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AS ADDRKSS, 

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DELIVERED 


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1 

IN THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC IN NE^^' 


YORK, 


ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1861. i 




i 
By EDWARD EVERETT. 

i 

i 
1 




i 
NEW YORK: 


GEO. ] 


P. PUTNAM, 532 BROADWAY. 




1861. 



address; 

BY EDAYARD EYERETT. 



Whkn the Congress of the United States, on the 4th of July, 1776, issued the 
evei' memorable Declaration which we commemorate to-day, they deemed that a 
decent respect for the opinions of mankind required a formal statement of the 
causes which impelled them to the all-important measure. The eighty-fifth anni- 
versary of the great Declaration finds the loyal people of the Union engaged in a 
tremendous conflict, to maintain and defend the grand nationality, which was 
asserted by our Fathers, and to prevent their fair Creation from crumbling into 
dishonorable Chaos. A great People, gallantly struggling to keep a noble fi-ame- 
work of government from falling into wretched fragments, needs no justification 
at the tribunal of the public opinion of mankind. But while our patriotic fellow- 
citizens, who have rallied to the defence of the Union, marshalled by the ablest 
of living chieftains, are risking their lives in the field ; while the blood of your 
youthful heroes and ours is poured out together in defence of this precious legacy 
of constitutional freedom, you will not think it a misappropriation of the hour, if I 
employ it in showing the justice of the cause in which we are engaged, and the 
fallacy of the arguments employed by the South, in vindication of the war, alike 
murderous and suicidal, which she is waging against the Constitution and the 
Union. 

PEOSPEROUS STATE OP THE COUNTPvT LAST YEAPv. 

A twelvemonth ago, nay, six or seven months ago, our country was regarded 
and spoken of by the rest of the civilized world, as among the most prosperous in 
the fiimily of nations. It was classed with' England, France, and Russia, as one 
of the four leading powet's of the age.f Remote as we were from the complica- 
tions of foreign politics, the exteiit of our commerce and the efficiency of our navy 
won for us the respectful consideration of Europe. The United States were par- 
ticularly referred to, on all occasions and in all countries, as an illustration of the 
mighty influence of free governments in promoting the prosperity of States. In 
England, notwithstanding some diplomatic collisions on boundary questions and 
occasional hostile reminiscences of the past, there has liardly been a del^ute for 
thirty years in parliament on any topic, in reference to which this country in the 

* Delivered, by request, at the Academy of Music, New York, July 4, ISCl. Largo portions of this address 
■were, on account of its length, necessarily omitted in the delivery, 
t The Edinburgh Peview for April, ISCl, p. C55. 



GIFT 



E^ATEOF \ • 



\ 

WILLI AI9I C:Ti IVES >\ ^ ' , • V\ \, 

APRIL, 1840 

6 ADDRESS ^BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

nature of things afTorded matter of comparison, in which it was not referred to as 
furnishl^ig instructive examples of prosperous enterprise and hopeful progress. At 
home, the country grew as *by* enchantment. Its vast geographical extent, aug- 
mented by magnificent accessions of conterminous territory peacefully made ; its 
population far more rapidly increasing than that of any other country, and swelled 
by an emigration from Europe such as the world has never before seen ; the mu- 
tually beneficial intercourse between its different sections and climates, each sup- 
pljing what the other wants; the rapidity with which the arts of civilization have 
been extended over a before unsettled wilderness, and, together with this material 
prosperity, the advance of the country in education, literature, science, and refine- 
ment, formed a spectacle, of which the history of mankind furnished no other ex- 
ample. That such was the state of the country six months ago was matter of 
general recognition and acknowledgment at home and abroad. 

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND ITS RESULTS 

There was, however, one sad deduction to be made, not from the truth of this 
description, not from the fidelity of this picture for that is incontestable, but from 
the content, happiness, and mutual good will which ought to have existed on the 
part of a People, favored by such an accumulation of Providential blessings. I 
allude, of course, to the great sectional controversies which have so long agitated 
the country, and arrayed the people in bitter geographical antagonism of political 
organization and action. Fierce party contentions had always existed in the United 
States, as they ever have and unquestionably ever will exist under all free elective 
governments ; and these contentions had, from the first, tended somewhat to a 
sectional character. They had not, however, till quite lately, assumed that char- 
acter so exclusively, that the minority in any one part of the country had not had 
a respectable electoral representation in every other. Till last November, there 
has never been a Southern Presidential Candidate, who did not receive electoral 
votes at the North, nor a Northern Candidate who did not receive electoral votes 
at the South. 

At the late election and for the first time, this was not the case ; and conse- 
quences the most extraordinary and deplorable have resulted. The country, as we 
have seen, being in profound peace at home and abroad, and in a state of unexam- 
pled prosperity — Agriculture, Commerce, Navigation, Manufactures, East, West, 
North, and South recovered or rapidly recovering from the crisis of 1857 — power- 
ful and respected abroad, and thriving beyond example at home, entered in the 
usual manner upon the electioneering campaign, for the choice of the nineteenth 
President of the United States. I say in the usual manner, though it is true that 
parties were more than usually broken up and subdivided. The normal division 
was into two great parties, but there had on several former occasions been three ; 
in 1824 there were four, and there w^ere four last November. The South equally 
W'ith the West and the North entered into the canvass ; conventions were held, 
nominations made, mass meetings assembled ; the platform, the press enlisted with 
unwonted vigor ; the election in all its stages, conducted in legal and constitutional 
ffinn, without violence and without surprise, and the result obtained by a decided 
majority. 

No sooner, however, was this result ascertained, than it appeared on the part 



SOUTH CAROLINA SECEDES FROM THE UNION. 7 

of one of the Southern States, and her example was rapidly followed by others, 
that it had by no means been the intention of those States to abide by the result of 
the election, except on the one condition, of the choice of their candidate. The 
reference of the great sectional controversy to the peaceful arbitrament of the 
ballot box, the great safety valve of republican institutions, though made with 
every appearance of good fiiith, on the part of our brethren at the South, meant 
but this : if we succeed in this election, as we have in fifteen that have preceded 
it, well and good ; we will consent to govern the country for four years more, as 
we have already governed it for sixty years ; but we have no intention of acquies- 
cing in any other result. We do not mean to abide by the election, although we 
participate in it, unless our candidate is chosen. If he fails we intend to prostrate 
the Government and break up the Union ; peaceably, if the States composing the 
majority are willing that it should be broken up peaceably ; otherwise, at the point 
of the sword. 

SOUTH CAROLINA SECEDES FEOM THE UNION. 

The election took place on the 6th of November, and in pursuance of the ex- 
traordinary programme just described, the State of South Carolina, acting by a 
Convention chosen for the purpose, assembled on the 17th of December, and on 
the 20th, passed unanimously what was styled " an ordinance to dissolve the Union 
between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her, under the 
compact entitled the Constitution, of the United States of America." It is not my 
purpose on this occasion to make a documentary speech, but as this so-called 
" Ordinance " is very short, and affords matter for deep reflection, I beg leave to 
recite it in full : — 

" We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, do 
declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the ordinance 
adopted by us in Convention on the 23d day of May, in the year of our Lord 
1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and also all acts 
and parts of acts of the general assembly of this State, ratifying the amendments 
of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, and that the Union now subsisting 
between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of 
America, is dissolved." 

This remarkable document is called an " Ordinance," and no doubt some special 
virtue is supposed to reside in the name. But names are nothing except as they 
truly represent things. An ordinance, if it is any thing clothed with binding 
force, is a Law, and nothing but a Law, and as such this ordinance, being in direct 
violation of the Constitution of the United States, is a mere nullity. The Constitu- 
tion contains the following express provision : " This Constitution and the Laws 
of the United States made in pursuance thereof, and the treaties made or which 
shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law 
of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the 
Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Such being 
the express provision of the Constitution of the United States, which the people of 
South Carolina adopted in 1788, just as much as they ever adopted either of their 
State Constitutions, is it not trifling with serious things to claim that, by the 
simple expedient of passing a law under the name of an ordinance, this provision and 



8 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

every other provision of it may be nullifiecl, and every magistrate and officer in 
Carolina, wliether of the State or Union, absolved from the oath which they have 
taken to support it ? 

But this is not all. This secession ordinance purports to " repeal " the ordi- 
nance of 23d May, 1788, by which the Constitution of the United States was 
ratified by the people of South Carolina. It was intended, of course, by calling the 
act of ratification an ordinance to infer a right of repealing it by another ordinance. 
It is important, therefore, to observe that the act of ratification is not, and was not 
at the time called, an ordinance, and contains nothing which by possibility can be 
repealed. It is in the following terms : — 

"The Convention [of the people of South Carolina], having maturely considered 
the Constitution, or form of government, reported to Congress by the convention 
of delegates from the United States of America, and submitted to them, by a reso- 
lution of the Legislature of this State passed the 17th and 18th days of February 
last, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic 
tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and 
secure the blessings of liberty to the people of the said United States and their 
posterity, do, in the name and in behalf of the people of this State, hereby assent 
to and ratify the same." 

Here it is evident that there is nothing in the instrument which, in the nature 
of things, can be repealed ; it is an authorized solemn assertion of the People of 
South Carolina, that they assent to, and ratify a form of government, wdiich is de- 
clared in terms to be paramount to all State laws and constitutions. This is a 
great historical fact, the most important that can ever occur in the history of a 
people. The fact that the People of South Carolina, on the 23d of May, 1788, 
assented to and ratified the Constitution of the United States, in order, among other 
objects, to secure the blessings of li'nerty for themselves and " their posterity," can 
no more be repealed in 18G1, than any other historical fact that occurred in Charles- 
ton in that year and on that day. It vrould be just as rational, at the present day, 
to attempt by ordinance to repeal any other event, as that the sun rose or that the 
tide ebbed and flowed on that day, as to repeal by ordinance the assent of Carolina 
to the Constitution. 

Again : it is well known that various amendments to the Constitution were de- 
sired and proposed in different States. The first of the amendments proposed by 
South Carolina was as follows : — 

" Whereas it is essential to the preservation of the rights reserved to the sev- 
eral States and the freedom of the People under the operation of the General 
Government, that the right of prescribing the manner, times, and places of holding 
the elections of the Federal Legislature should be forever inseparably annexed to 
the sovereignty of the States ; this Convention doth declare that the same ought to 
remain to all posterity, a perpetual and fundamental right in the local, exclusive of 
the interference of the (7c«erc!^ Government, except in cases where the Legislature of 
the States sliall refuse or neglect to perform or fulfil the same, according to the 
tenor of the said Constitution." 

Here you perceive that South Carolina herself in 1788 desired a provision to 
be made and annexed inseparably to her sovereignty, that she should forever have 
the power of prescribing the time, place, and manner of holding the elections of 



IS SECESSION A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT, OR IS IT REVOLUTION? 9 

members of Congress ; — but even in making this express reservation, to operate 
for all posterity, she was willing to provide that, if the State Legislatures refuse 
or neglect to perform the duty, (which is precisely the case of the Seceding States 
at the present day.) then the General Government was, by this South Carolina 
amendment, expressly authorized to do it. South Carolina in 1788, Ity a sort of 
prophetic foresight, looked forward to the possibility that the States might " refuse 
or neglect " to cooperate in carrying on the Government, and admitted, in that case, 
that the General Government must go on, in spite of their delinquency. 

I have dwelt on these points at some length, to show how futile is the attempt, 
by giving the name of " ordinance " to the act, by which South Carolina adopted 
•the Constitution, and entered the Union, to gain a power to leave it by a subse- 
quent ordinance of repeal/^ 

IS SECESSION A CONSTITUTIONAL EIGHT, OE IS IT EEVOLUTION ? 

Whether the present lamatural civil war is waged by the South, in virtue of a 
supposed constitutional right to leave the Union at pleasure ; or whether it is an 
exercise of the great and ultimate right of revolution, the existence of which no one 
denies, seems to be left in uncertainty by the leaders of the movement. Mr. Jef- 
ferson Davis, the President of the new confederacy, in his inaugural speech delivered 
on the 18th of February, declares that it is " an abuse of language " to call it " a 
revolution." Mr. Vice-President Stephens, on the contrary, in a speech at Sa- 
vannah, on the 21st of March, pronounces it "one of the greatest revolutions in the 
ainials of the world." The question is of great magnitude as one of constitutional 
and public law ; as one of morality it is of very little consequence whether the 
country is drenched in blood, in the exercise of a right claimed under the Consti- 
tution, or the right inherent in every community to revolt against an oppressive 
government. Unless the oppression is so extreme as to justify revolution, it would 
not justify the evil of breaking up a government, under an abstract constitutional 
right to do so. 

NEITIIEE A GEANTED NOE A EESEEVED EIGHT. 

This assumed right of Secession rests upon the doctrine that the Union is a 
compact between Independent States, from which any one of them may withdraw 
at pleasure in virtue of its sovereignty. This imaginary right has been the subject 
of discussion for more than thirty years, having been originally suggested, though 
not at first much dwelt upon, in connection with the kindred claim of a right, on 
the part of an individual State, to *' nullify " an Act of Congress. It would, of 
course, be impossible within the limits of the hour to review these elaborate dis- 
■cussions. I will only remark, on this occasion, that none of the premises from 
which this remarkable conclusion is drawn, are recognized in the Constitution, and 
that the right of Secession, though claimed to be a " reserved " right, is not expresshj 
reserved in it. That instrument does not purport to be a " compact," but a Con- 
stitution of Government. It appears, in its first sentence, not to have been entered 
into by the States, but to have been ordained and established by the People of the 
United States, for " themselves and their posterity." The States are not named in 
it ; nearly all the characteristic powers of sovereignty arc expressly granted to the 

* Sec Appendix A- 



10 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

General Government iand expressly prohibited to the States, and so far from re- 
serving a right of secession to the latter, on any ground or mider any pretence, it 
ordains and establishes in terms the Constitution of the United States as the Su- 
preme Law of the land, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the 
contrary notwithstanding. 

It would seem that this is as clear and positive as language can make it. But 
it is argued, that, though the right of secession is not reserved in terms, it must be 
considered as implied in the general reservation to the States and to the People of 
all the poAvers not granted to Congress nor prohibited to the States. This extraor- 
dinary assumption, more distinctly stated, is that, in direct defiance of the express 
grant to Congress and the express prohibition to the States of nearly all the powers 
of an independent government, there is, bij imjolicationy a right reserved to the 
States to assume and exercise all these powers thus vested in the Union and pro- 
hibited to themselves, simply in virtue of going through the ceremony of passing a 
law called an Ordinance of Secession. A general reservation to the States of powers 
not prohibited to them, nor granted to Congress is an implied reservation to the 
States of a right to exercise these very powers thus expressly delegated to Congress 
and thus expressly prohibited to the States ! 

The Constitution directs that the Congress of the United States shall have power 
to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, to raise and support armies, to 
provide and maintain a navy, and that the President of the United States, by and 
with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall make treaties with foreign powers. 

These express grants of power to the Government of the United States are fol- 
lowed by prohibitions as express to the several States : — 

" No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, grant letters 
of marque or reprisal : no State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty 
of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement 
or compact with another State, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless 
actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay." 

These and numerous other express grants of power to the General Government, 
and express prohibitions to the States, are further enforced by the comprehensive 
provision, already recited, that the Constitution and Laws of the United States aro 
paramount to the laws and Constitution of the separate States. 

And this Constitution, with these express grants and express prohibitions, and 
with this express subordination of the States to the General Government, has been 
adopted by the People of all the States ; and all their judges and other officers, and 
all their citizens holding office under the government of the United States or the 
individual States, are solemnly sworn to support it. 

In the face of all this, in defiance of all this, in violation of all this, in contempt 
of all this, the seceding States claim the right to exercise every power expressly 
delegated to Congress and expressly prohibited to the States by that Constitution,, 
which every one of their prominent men, civil and military, is under oath to sup- 
port. Tliey have entered into a confederation, raised an army, attempted to pro- 
vide a navy, issued letters of marque and reprisal, waged war, and that war, — 
Merciful Heaven forgive them, — not with a foreign enemy, not with tlie wild tribes 
which still desolate the unprotected frontier ; (they, it is said, are swelling, armed 
with tomahawk and scalping-knife, the Confederate forces ;) but with their owa 



BEFORE THE REVOLUTION THE COLONIES WERE A PEOPLE. H 

countrymen, and the mildest and most beneficent government on the face of the 
earth ! 

BEFORE THE EEVOLUTIOX THE COLONIES WERE A PEOPLE. 

But we are told all this is done in virtue of the Sovereignty of the States ; as if, 
because a State is Sovereign, its people were incompetent to establish a government 
for themselves and their posterity. Certainly the States arc clothed with Sover- 
eignty for local purposes ; but it is doubtful whether they ever possessed it in any 
other sense; and if they had, it is certain that they ceded it to the General Govern- 
ment, in adopting the Constitution. Before their independence of England was 
asserted, they constituted a provincial people, (Burko calls it '-'a glorious Em- 
pire,") subject to the British crown, organized for certain purposes under separate 
colonial charters, but, on some great occasions of political interest and public safety, 
acting as one. Thus they acted when, on the approach of the great Seven Years' 
War° which exerted such an important influence on the fate of British America, they 
sent their delegates to Albany to concert a plan of union. In the discussions of 
that plan which was reported by Franklin, the citizens of the colonies were evi- 
dently considered as a People. When the passage of the Stamp Act in 17G5 
roused the spirit of resistance throughout America, the Unity of her People assumed 
a still more practical form. " Union," says one of our great American historians,^ 
"was the hope of Otis. Union that 'should knit and work into the very blood 
and bones of the original system every region as fast as settled.' " In this hope 
he ar<Tued against wVits of assistance, and in this hope he brought about the 
call of the Convention at New York in 1765. At that Convention, the noble South 
Carolinian Christopher Gadsden, with prophetic foreboding of the disintegrating 
heresies of the present day, cautioned his associates against too great dependence 
on their colonial charters. " I wish," said he, " that the charters may not ensnare 
us at last, by drawing different Colonies to act differently in this great cause. 
Whenever that is the case all is over with the whole. There ought to be no New 
England man, no Neio Yorker, knoiim on the Continent, but alio/ us Americans:'\ 

While the patriots in America counselled, and wrote, and spoke as a people, 
they were recognized as such in England. " Believe me," cried Colonel Barre in 
the House of Commons, " I this day told you so, the same spirit of Freedom wliich 
actuated that People at first will accompany them still. The people, I believe, arc 
as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a People jealous of their liberties, 
and who will vindicate them, should they be violated." 

When ten years later the great struggle long foreboded came on, it was felt, on 
both sides of the Atlantic, to be an attempt to reduce a free People beyond the sea 
to unconditional dependence on a parliament in which they were not represen^ted. 
'•' What foundation have we," was the language of Chatham on the 27th Jan. 177;>, 
" for our claims over America? What is our right to persist in such cruel and 
vindictive measures against that loyal, respectable People ? How have this respect- 
able people behaved under all their grievances? Repeal, therefore, I say. But 
bare repeal will not satisfy this enlightened and spirited PeopleP Lord Camden 
iR the same debate, exclaimed, " You have no right to tax America ; tlie iiatural 
rights of miin, and the immutable laws of Nature, are with that People. Burke, 

* Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. v., p. 292. t Ibid., p. 335. 



12 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

two months later, made his great speech for conciliation with America. '• I do not 
know," he exclaimed, " the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole 
People." In a letter written two years after the commencement of the war, he 
traces the growth of the colonies from their feeble beginnings to the magnitude 
Avhich they had attained when the revolution broke out, and in which his glowing 
imagination saw future grandeur and power beyond the reality, " At the first 
designation of these colonial assemblies," says he, " they were probably not in- 
tended for any thing more (nor perhaps did they think themselves much higher) 
than the municipal corporations within this island, to which some at present love 
to compare them. But nothing in progression can rest on its original plan ; we 
may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. Therefore, as 
the Colonies prospered and increased to a numerous and mighty people, spreading 
over a very great tract of the globe, it was natural that they should attribute to 
assemblies so resj)ectable in the formed Constitution, some part of the dignity of 
the great nations which they represented." 

The meeting of the first Continental Congress of 1774 was the spontaneous 
impulse of the People. All their resolves and addresses proceed on the assumption 
that they represented a People. Their first appeal to the Royal authority was 
their letter to General Gage, remonstrating against the fortifications of Boston. 
" We entreat your Excellency to consider," they say, " what a tendency this con- 
duct must have to irritate and force a free People, hitherto well disposed to peace- 
able measures, into hostilities." Their final act, at the close of the Session, their 
address to the King, one of the most eloquent and pathetic of State papers, appeals 
to him " in the name of all your Majesty's faithful People in America." 

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE EECOGNIZES A PEOPLE. 

But this all-important principle in our political system is placed beyond doubt, 
by an authority which makes all further argument or illustration superfluous. 
That the citizens of the British Colonies, however divided for local purposes into 
different governments, when they ceased to be subject to the English crown, became 
ipso facto one People for all the high concerns of national existence, is a foot em- 
bodied in the Declaration of Independence itself. That august Manifesto, the 
Magna Charta, which introduced us into the family of nations, vras issued to the 
w^orld, so its first sentence sets forth — because " a decent respect for the opinions 
of mankind requires " such solemn announcement of motives and causes to be 
made, " when in the coui-se of human events it becomes necessary for one People 
to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another." INIr. 
Jefferson Davis, in liis message of the 29th of April, deems it important to remark, 
that, by the treaty of peace with Great Britain, " the several States were each by 
name recognized to be independent." It would be more accurate to say that the 
United States each by name were so recognized. Such enumeration was necessar}^, 
in order to fix beyond doubt, which of the Anglo-American colonies, twenty-five 
or six in number, were included in the recognition.* But it is surely a far more 
significant circumstance, that the separate States are not named in the Declaration 

'Burke's account of "the English settlements in America," begins with Jamaica, and proceeds through tho 
West India Islands. There were also English settlements on the Continent, Canada— and Nova Scutia,— wbicU it 
■was necessary to exclude from the. Treaty, by an enumeration of the included Colonics. 



THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION. 13 

of Independence, that they are called only by the collective designation of the 
United States of America ; that the manifesto is issued " in the name and by the 
authority of the good people " of the Colonies, and that they are characterized in 
the first sentence as " One People." 

Let it not be thought that these are the latitudinarian doctrines of modern 
times, or of a section of the country predisposed to a loose construction of laws 
and Constitutions. Listen, I pray you, to the noble words of a Southern revolu- 
tionary patriot and statesman : — 

" The sepai'ate independence and individual sovereignty of the several States 
were never thought of by the enlightened band of patriots who framed the Decla- 
ration of Independence. The sevei'al States are not even mentioned by name in any 
part of it, as if it was intended to impress this maxim on America, that our Freedom 
and Independence arose from our Union, and that without it we could neither be 
free nor independent. Let us then consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by 
maintaining that each State is separately and individually independent, as a species 
of political heresy, which can never benefit us, and may bring on us the most 
serious distresses." * These are the solemn and prophetic words of Charles Cotos- 
worth Pinckney ; the patriot, the soldier, the statesman ; the trusted friend of 
Washington, repeatedly called by him to the highest offices of the Government ; 
the one name that stands highest and brightest, on the list of the great men of 
South Carolina.f 

THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDEKATION. 

Not only was the Declaration of Independence made in the name of the one 
People of the United States, but the war by which it was sustained was carried on 
by their authority. A very grave historical error, in this respect, is often com- 
mitted by the politicians of the Secession School. Mr. Davis, in his message of 
the 29th of April, having called the old Confederation " a close alliance," says : 
" under this contract of alliance the war of the revolution was successfully waged, 
and resulted in the treaty of peace with Great Britain of 1783, by the terms of 
which the several States were each by name recognized to be independent." I have 
already given the reason for this enumeration, but the main fact alleged in the 
passage is entirely without foundation. The Articles of Confederation were first 
signed by the delegates from eight of the States, on the 9th of July, 1778, more 
than three years after the commencement of the war, long after the capitulation 
of Bui'goyne, the alliance with France, and the reception of a French ^Minister. 
The ratification of the other States was given at intervals the following years, the 
last not till 1781, seven months only before the virtual close of the war, by the 
surrender of Cornwallis. Then, and not till then, was " the Contract of Alliance " 
consummated. Most true it is, as Mr. Davis bids us remark, that, by these Arti- 
cles of Confedei-ation the States retained " each its sovereignty, freedom, and inde- 
pendence." It is not less true, that their selfish struggle to exercise and enforce 
their assumed rights as separate sovereignties was the source of the greatest difli- 
culties and dangers of the Revolution, and risked its success ; not less true, that most 
of the great powers of a sovereign State were nominally conferred even by these 

* Elliott's Debates, vol. iv., p. 801. 

t See an admirable sketch of his character in Trescot's Diplomatic Uistorj- of tho Administrations of "VTa'.b- 
ington and Adams, pp. 1C9— 111. 



14 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

articles on the Congress, and that that body -was regarded and spoken of by Wash- 
ington himself as the "Sovereign of the Union." * 

But feeble as the old Confederation was, and distinctly as it recognized the 
sovereignty of the States, it recognized in them no right to withdraw at their 
pleasure from the Union. On the contrary, it was specially provided that " the 
Articles of Confederation should be inviolably preserved by every State," and that 
" the Union should be perpetual" It is true that in a few years, from the inherent 
weakness of the central power, and from the want of means to enforce its authority 
on the individual citizen, it fell to pieces. It sickened and died from the poison of 
what General Pinckney aptly called " the heresy of State Sovereignty," and in its 
place a Constitution was ordained and established " in order to form a more perfect 
Union ; " a Union more binding on its members than this " contract of alliance," 
which yet was to be " inviolably observed by every State ; " more durable than 
the old Union, v/hich yet was declared to be " perpetual." This great and benefi- 
cent change was a Revolution — happily a peaceful revolution, the most important 
change probably ever brought about in a government, without bloodshed. The 
new government was unanimously adopted by all the members of the old Confed- 
eration, by some more promptly than by others, but by all within the space of 
four years. 

THE STATES MIGHT BE COEECED UNDEK THE CONFEDEExVTION. 

IMueh has been said against coercion, that is, the employment of force to compel 
obedience to the laws of the United States, when they are resisted under the as- 
sumed authority of a State ; but even the old Confederation, with all its weakness, 
in the opinion of the most eminent contemporary statesmen possessed this power. 
Great stress is laid by politicians of the Secession School on the fact, that in a 
project for amending the articles of Confederation brought forward by Judge Pat- 
erson in the Federal Convention, it was proposed to clothe the Government with 
this power and the proposal was not adopted. This is a very inaccurate statement 
of the facts of the case. The proposal formed part of a project which was rejected 
in toto. The reason why this power of State coercion was not granted eo nomine, 
in the new Constitution, is that it was wholly superfluous and inconsistent with the 
fundamental principle of the Government. Within the sphere of its delegated 
powers, the General Government deals with the individual citizen. If its power is 
resisted, the person or persons resisting it do so at their peril and are amenable to 
the law. Tliey can derive no immunity from State Legislatures or State Conven- 
tions, because the Constitution and laws of the United States are the Supreme Law 
of the Land. If the resistance assumes an organized form, on the part of numbers too 
great to be restrained by the ordinary powers of the law, it is then an insurrection, 
which the General Government is expressly authorized to suppress. Did any one 
imagine in 1703, when General Washington called out 15,000 men to suppress the 
insurrection in the Western counties of Pennsylvania, that if the insurgents had 
happened to have the control of a majority of the Legislature, and had thus been 
able to clothe their rebellion with a pretended form of law, that he would have 
been obliged to disband his troops, and return himself baflled and discomfited to 
Mount Vernon ? If John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, instead of being the 

♦ Sparks' Washington, vol. Ix., pp. 12, 23, 29. 



ST-VTE SOVEREIGNTY DOES XOT AUTHORIZE SECESSION. 1.1 

his surrender ? Confederation, M'ith all its ^veakness, was held 

But, as I have said, even tl e o d to ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^_ 

bv the ablest contemporary statesmen, auu , o,,,, at,, ipffl.r 

J I Wury till the Confederacy shows its teeth. Tke Stat,, mt.t « ll.c ro^, 
"«t;/ f" ,1(6. /«i/ «.-.«"/''-«• Every rational eitizen must w.sh to see 
aCeffe ive i„strun,ent of eoereion, and should fear to see it on any other element 
In th vater. A naval foree oan never endanger our liberties nor ocoasmn blood- 
hod a llnd foreo .-ould do both." In the follo«-ing year and when the Confedera- 
r, m 4as at its last »asp, Mr. Jefferson «as still of the opinion th.at it possessed the 
;: of eo oi : tS 1 ates, and that it .as expedient to exercise it. In a letter to 
Col an- n ' on of the 4th of April, 1787, he says : " It has been so often sa,d as to 
be tenerali; believed, that Congress h,ave no power by the Confederafon to enforce 
a,; h " for instance, contributions of money. It was not necessary to g,ve them 
hat pwe'r expressly, Ihey h.ave it by the law of nature, men ..o p.r,.e. ,na,ea 
cZacI aJremlL to each ,ke power of co,n,emnr, the other to e.eente ,t Com- 
Son'was never so easy as in our ease, when a single frigate would soon levy on 
the commerce of a single State the deficiency of its contributions. 

Su h was Mr. Jelferson's opinion of the powers of Congress under the 'old 
contract of alliance." Will any reasonable man maintain that under a constitution 
of government there can be less power to enforce the laws . 

STiTE SOVEEEIGSTT DOES NOT AOTHOEIZE SECESSION. 

But .he cause of secession gains nothing by magnifying f /"O'""' "J '''''1°^^ 
crei^ty of the States or calling the Constitution a compact between them. Cil i | 
it a compact does not change a word of its text, and no theory of what is implied 
thew'o 1 « Sovereignty ''is of any weight, in opposition to the •-'»»> r-visio„ 
of he instrument itseff. 'so.eret,nty is a woi^d of ver,- --■""-jS-^f -„J'^ 
one thin, in China, another in Turkey, another in Russia, auohei in 1 ■••'™^. ^ 
other in England, .aliother in Switzerland, another in San «-"»• -°* J ,, '» 



16 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

day, but for their posterity,) she may therefore at pleasure secede from the Union 
existing under that Constitution, is simply to beg the question. That question is 
not Avhat was the theory or form of government existing in V.li-ginia, before the 
Constitution, but what are the provisions of the Constitution which her people 
adopted and made their own % Does the Constitution of the United States permit 
or forbid the States to enter into a confederation ? Is it a mere loose partnership, 
which any of the parties can break up nt pleasure, or is it a Constitution of govern- 
ment, delegating to Congress and prohibiting to the States most of the primal func- 
tions of a sovereign power ;— Peace, War, Commerce, Finance, Navy, Army, Mail, 
Mint ; Executive, Legislative, and Judicial functions ? The States are not named 
in it ; the word Sovereignty does not occur in it ; the right of secession is as much 
ignored in it as the precession of the Equinoxes, and all the great prerogatives 
which characterize an independent member of the family of nations are by distinct 
grant conferred on Congress by the People of the United States and prohibited to 
the individual States of the Union. Is it not the height of absurdity to maintain 
that all these express grants and distinct prohibitions, and constitutional arrange- 
ments, may be set at nought by an individual State under the pretence that she was 
a sovereign State before she assented to or ratified them ; in other words, that an 
act is of no binding force because it was performed by an authorized and competent 
agent ? 

In fact, to deduce from the sovereignty of the States the right of seceding from 
the Union is the most stupendous noti sequitur that was ever advanced in o-rave 
affairs. The only legitimate inference to be drawn from that sovereignty is pre- 
cisely the reverse. If any one right can be predicated of a sovereign State, it is 
that of forming or adopting a frame of government. She may do it alone, or she 
may do it as a member of a Union. She may enter into a loose pact for ten years 
or till a partisan majority of a convention, goaded on by ambitious aspirants to 
power, shall vote in secret session to dissolve it ; or she may, after grave delibera- 
tion and mature counsel, led by the wisest and most virtuous of the land, ratify and 
adopt a constitution of government, ordained and established not only for that gen- 
eration, but their posterity, subject only to the inalienable right of revolution pos- 
sessed by every political community. 

What would be thought in private affiiirs of a man who should seriously claim 
the right to revoke a grant, in consequence of having an unqualified right to make 
it ? A right to break a contract, because he had a right to enter into it 1 To what 
extent is it more rational on the part of a State to found the right to dissolve the 
Union on the competence of the parties to form it ; the right to prostrate a govern- 
ment on the fact that it was constitutionally framed ? 

PARALLEL CASES : IRELAND, SCOTLAXD. 

But let us look at parallel cases, and they are by no means wanting. In th-e 
year 1800, a union was f)rmed between England and Ireland. Ireland, before she 
entered into the union, was subject, indeed, to the English crown, but she had her 
own parliament, consisting of her own Lords and Commons, and enacting her own 
laws. In 1800 she entered into a constitutional union with England on the basis 
of articles of agreement, jointly accepted by the two pari laments.-- The union was 

* Annuxil Register, xlii., p. 190 



VIRGINIA VAINLY ATTEMPTS TO ESTABLISH A RESERVED RIGHT. 17 

opposed at the time by a powerful minority in Ireland, and ^Ir. CConnell suc- 
ceeded, thirty years later, by ardent appeals to the sensibilities of the people, in 
producing an almost unanimous desire for its dissolution. lie professed, however, 
although he had wrought his countrymen to the verge of rebellion, to aim at notli- 
ing but a constitutional repeal of the articles of union by the parliament of Great 
Britain. It never occurred even to his fervid imagination, that, because Ireland 
was an independent government when she entered into the union, it w. s eompctent 
for her at her discretion to secede from it. \Vhat would our English friends, who 
have learned from our Secessionists the '• inherent right " of a disaffected State to 
secede from our Union, have thought, had Mr. O'Connell, in the paroxysms of his 
agitation, claimed the right on the part of Ireland, by her own act, to sever her 
union with England ? 

Again, in 1706, Scotland and England formed a Constitutional Union. They 
also, though subject to the same monarch, were in other respects Sovereign and 
independent Kingdoms. They had each its separate parliament, courts of justice, 
laws, and established national church. Articles of union were established between 
them ; but all the laws and statutes of either kingdom not contrary to these articles, 
remained in force.* A powerful minority in Scotland disapproved of the Union at 
the time. Nine years afterward an insurrection broke out in Scotland under a 
prince, who claimed to be the lawful, as he certainly was the lineal, heir to the 
throne. The rebellion was crushed, but the disaffection in which it had its origin 
was not wholly appeased. In thirty years more a second Scottish insurrection took 
place, and, as before, under the lead of the lineal heir to the crown. On neither 
occasion that I ever heard of, did it enter into the imagination of rebel or loyalist, 
that Scotland was acting under a reserved right as a sovereign kingdom, to secede 
from the Union, or that the movement was any thing less than an insurrection ; 
revolution if it succeeded ; treason and rebellion if it failed. Neither do I recollect 
that, in less than a month after either insurrection broke out, any one of the friendly 
and neutral powers made haste, in anticipation even of the arrival of the ministers 
of the reigning sovereign, to announce that the rebels " would be recognized as bel- 
ligerents." 

YIKGIXIA VAINLY ATTEMPTS TO ESTABLISH A RESERVED LIGHT. 

In fact, it is so pLiin, in the nature of things, that there can be no constitutional 
right to break up a government unless it is e.\'pressly provided for, that the politi- 
cians of the secession school are driven back, at every turn, to a reserved right. I 
have already shown that there is no such express reservation, and I have dwelt on 
the absurdity (;f getting by implicntion a reserved right to violate every express 
provision of a constitution. In this strait, Virginia, proverlually skilled in logical 
subtilties, has attempted to find an express reservation, not, of course, in the Con- 
stitution itself, where it does not exist, but in her original act of adhesion, or rather 
in the declaration of the " impressions " under which that act was adopted. The 
ratification itself of Virginia, was positive and unconditional. " We, the said dele- 
gates, in the name and behalf of the People of Virginia^ do, by these presents, assent 
and ratify the Constitution recommended on the 17th day of September, 1787, by 
the Federal Convention, /or the government of the United States, hereby announcing 

* Eapin's History of England, vol. iv., p. 741-C. 

2 



18 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

to all those v.hom it may concern, that the said Constitution is binding upon the 
eaid People, according to an autiientic copy hereunto annexed. Done in Convention 
this 26th day of June, 1788." 

This, as you perceive, is an absolute and unconditional ratification of the Con- 
stitution by the People of Vii-ginia. An attempt, liowevcr, is made, by the late 
Convention in Virginia, in their ordinance of secession, to extract a reservation of a 
right to secede, out of the declaration contained in the preamble to the act of ratiii- 
cation. That preamble declares it to be an " impression " of the people of Vir- 
ginia, that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people 
of the United States, may be resumed by them, whenever the same shall be per- 
verted to their injury or oppression. The ordinance of secession passed by the 
recent convention, purporting to cite this declaration, omits the v*'ords by them, that 
is, by the People of the United States, not by the people of any single State, thus 
arrogating to the people of Virginia alone what the Convention of 1788 claimed 
only, and that by Avay of " impression," for the People of the United States. 

By this most grave omission of the vital words of the sentence, the Convention, 
I fear, intended to lead the incautious or the ignorant to the conclusion, that the 
Convention of 1788 asserted the right of an individual State to resume the powers 
granted in the Constitution to the General Government ; a claim for which there is 
not the slightest foundation in Constitutional history. On the contrary, when the 
ill-omened doctrine of State nullification was sought to be sustained by the same 
argument in 1830, and the famous Virginia resolutions of 1798 were appealed to 
by Mr. Calhoun and his friends, as affording countenance to that doctrine, it was 
repeatedly and emphatically declared by ]\Ir. Madison, the author of the resolutions, 
that they were intended to claim, not for an individual State, but for the United 
States, by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, the right of reme- 
dying its abuses by constitutional ways, such as united protest, repeal, or an 
amendment of the Constitution.* Incidentally to the discussion of nullification, he 
denied over and over again the right of peaceable secession ; and this fact was well 
known to some of the members of the late Convention at Richmond. When the 
secrets of their assembly are laid open, no doubt it will appear that there were 
some foithful Abdiels to proclaim the fact. Oh, that the venerable sage, second to 
none of his patriot compeers in framing the Constitution, the equal associate of 
Hamilton in recommending it to the People; its great champion in the Virginia 
Convention of 1788, and its faithful vindicator in 1830, against the deleterious 
heresy of nullification, could have been spared to protect it, at the present day, 
from the still deadlier venom of Secession ! But he is gone ; the principles, the 
traditions, and the illustrious memories which gave to Virginia her name and her 
praise in the land, are no longer cherished ; the work of Washington, and Madison, 
and Randolph, and Pendleton, and Marshall is repudiated, and nullificrs, precipita- 
tors, and seceders gather in secret conclave to destroy the Constitution, in the very 
building that holds the monumental statue of the Father of his Country ! 

THE VIRGINIA EESOLUTIONS OF 1798. 

Having had occasion to allude to the Virginia resolutions of 1708, I may ob- 
serve that of these famous resolves, the subject of so much political romance, it is 

• Maguire's Collection, p. 213. 



TUE VIRGINIA RESOLUTIONS OF 179S. 19 

time that a little plain truth should be i^romulgated. The country, in 1798, was 
vehemently agitated by the struggles of the domestic parties, which about equally 
divided it, and these struggles were urged to unwonted and extreme bitterness, by 
the preparations made and making for a war with France. By an act of Congress, 
passed in the summer of that year, the President of the United States was clothed 
with power to send from the country any alien whom he might judge dangerous to 
the public peace and safety, or who should be concerned in any treasonable or secret 
machinations against the Government of the United States. This act was passed 
as a war measure ; it was to bo in force two years, and it expired by its own limit- 
ation on the 25th of June, 1800. War, it is true, had not been formally declared ; 
but hostilities on the ocean had taken place on both sides, and the army of tlie 
United States had been placed upon a war footing. The measure was certainly 
within the war power, and one which no prudent commander, even without the 
authority of a statute, would hesitate to execute in an urgent case within his own 
district. Congress thought fit to provide for and regulate its exercise by law. 

Two or three weeks later (14th July, 1798) another law was enacted, making 
it penal to combine or conspire with intent to oppose any lawful measure of the 
Government of the United States, or to write, print, or publish any flilse and 
scandalous writing against the Government, either House of Congress, or the 
President of the United States. In prosecutions under this law, it was provided 
that the Truth might be pleaded in justification, and that the Jury should be judges 
of the law as well as of the fact. This law was by its own limitation to expire at 
the close of the then current Presidential term. 

Such are the famous alien and sedition laws, passed under the Administration 
of that noble and true-hearted revolutionary patriot, John Adams, though not re- 
commended by him ofilcially or privately ; adjudged to be cc^nstitutional by the 
Supreme Court of the United States ; distinctly approved by Washington, Patrick 
Plenry, and Marshall ; and, whatever else may be said of them, certainly preferable 
to the laws which, throughout the Seceding States, Judge Lynch would not fail to 
enforce at the lamp-post and tar-bucket against any person guilty of the offences 
against which these statutes were aimed. 

It suited, however, the purposes of party at that time, to raise a formidable 
clamor against these laws. It was in vain that their Constitutionality was aftirmcd 
by the Judiciary of the United States. " Nothing," said 'Washington, alluding to 
these laws, " will produce the least change in the conduct of the leaders of the 
opposition to the measures of the General Government. They have points to 
carry from which no reasoning, no inconsistency of conduct, no absurdity can 
divert them." Such, in the opinion of Washington, was the object for which the 
Legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky passed their fmious resdlutions of 1798, 
the former drafted by Mr. Madison, and the latter by Mr. Jeffl'rson, and sent to a 
friend in Kentucky to be brought forward. These resolutions were transmitted to 
the other States for their concurrence. The replies from the States which made 
any response were referred the following year to committees in Virginia and Ken- 
tucky. In the Legislature of Vii-ginia, an elaborate report was made by ]\Ir. 
Madison, explaining and defending the resolutions; in Kentucky another resolve 
reaffirming those of the preceding year was drafted by Mr. Wilson Cary Nicholas, 
not by Mr. Jefferson, as stated by General McDuffle. Our respect for the dis- 



20 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

tinguished men who took the lead on this occasion, then ardently engaged in the 
warfare of politics, must not make us fear to tell the truth, that the simple object 
of the entire movement was to make " political capital " for the approaching elec- 
tion, by holding up to the excited imaginations of the masses the Alien and Sedi- 
tion laws, as an infraction of the Constitution, which threatened the overthrow of 
the liberties of the People. The resolutions maintained that, the States being 
parties to the Constitutional compact, in a case of deliberate, palpable, and danger- 
ous exercise of powers not granted by the compact, the States have a right and are 
in duty bound to inteiyose for preventing the progress of the evil. 

Such, in brief, was the main purport of the Virginia and Kentuclcy resolutions. 
The sort of interposition intended was left in studied obscurity. Not a word was 
dropped of secession from the Union. ]\Ir. Nicholas's resolution in 1799 hinted at 
'■' nullification " as the appropriate remedy for an unconstitutional law, but what 
was meant by the ill-sounding word was not explained. The words " null, void, 
and of no effect," contained in the original draft of the Virginia resolutions, were, 
on motion of John Taylor of Caroline, stricken from them, on their passage through 
the assembly ; and ]\Ir. Madison, in his report of 1799, carefully explains that no 
extra constitutional measures were intended. One of the Kentucky resolutions 
ends with an invitation to the States to unite in a jDctition to Congress to repeal 
the laws. 

These resolutions were communicated, as I have said, to the other States for 
concurrence. From most of them no response was received ; some adopted dis- 
senting reports and resolutions; not one concurred. But the resolutions did 
tlieir work — all that they were intended or expected to do — by shaking the Ad- 
ministration. At the ensuing election, Mr. Jefferson, at whose instance the entire 
movement was made, was chosen President by a very small majority ; Mr. Madison 
was placed at the head of his administration as Secretary of State ; the obnoxious 
laws expired by their own limitation ; not repealed by the dominant party, as Mr. 
Calhoun with strange inadvertence asserts ; ^- and Mr. Jefferson j^roceeded to ad- 
minister the Government upon constitutional principles quite as lax, to say the 
least, as those of his predecessors. If there was any marked departure in his 
general policy from the course hitherto pursued, it was that, having some theoret- 
ieal prejudices against a navy, ho allowed that branch of the service to languish. 
By no Administration have the powers of the General Government been more 
liberally construed — not to say further strained— sometimes beneficially, as in the 
acquisition of Louisiana, sometimes perniciously as in the embargo. The resolu- 
tions of 1798, and the metaphysics they inculcated, were surrendered to the cob- 
webs which habitually await the plausible exaggerations of the canvass after an 
election is decided. These resolutions of 1798 have been sometimes in Virginia 
waked from their slumbers at closely contested elections as a party cry ; the re- 
port of the Hartford Convention, without citing them l)y name, boi-rows their 
language ; but as representing in their modern interpretation any system on which 
the Government ever was or could be administered, they were buried in the same 
grave as the Laws which called them fortli. 

Unhappily during their transient vitality, like the butterfly which deposits its 
egg in the apple blossoms that have so lately filled our orchards with beauty and 

* Mr. Calhoun's Discourse on the ConstituUon, p. 85D. 



THE VIRGIXIA KESOLUTIOXS OF 179S. 21 

perfume — a gilded harmless moth, whose food is a dew drop, whose life is a mid- 
summer's day — these resolutions, misconceived and perverted, proved, in the minds 
of ambitious and reckless politicians, the germ of a fatal heresy. The butterfly's 
egg is a microscopic speck, but as the fruit grows, the little speck gives life to a 
greedy and nauseous worm, that gnaws and bores to the heart of the apple, and 
renders it, though smooth and foir without, foul and bitter and rotten within. In 
like manner, the theoretical generalities of these resolutions, intending nothing in 
the minds of their authors but constitutional efforts to procure the repeal of ob- 
noxious laws, matured in the minds of a later generation into the deadly para- 
doxes of 1830 and 1860 — kindred products of the same soil, venenorum ferax ; — 
the one asserting the monstrous absurdity that a State, though remaining in the 
Union, could by her single act nullify a law of Congress ; the other teaching the 
still more preposterous doctrine, that a single State may nullify the Constitution. 
The first of these heresies failed to spread far beyond the latitude where it was 
engendered. In the Senate of the United States, the great acuteness of its inventor, 
(Mr. Calhoun,) then the Vice-President, and the accomplished rhetoric of its 
champion, (Mr. Hayne,) failed to raise it above the level of a plausible sophism. 
It sunk forever discredited beneath the sturdy common sense and indomitable will 
of Jackson, the mature wisdom of Livingston, the keen analysis of Clay, and the 
crushing logic of Webster. 

Nor was this all : the venerable author of the Resolutions of 1798 and of the 
report of 1799 was still living in a green old age. His connection with those State 
papers and still more his large participation in the formation and adoption of the 
Constitution, entitled him, beyond all men living, to be consulted on the subject. 
No effort was spared by the Leaders of the Nullification school to draw from him 
even a qualified assent to their theories. But in vain. He not only refused to admit 
their soundness, but he devoted his time and energies for three laborious years to the 
preparation of essays and- letters, of which the object was to demonstrate that his 
resolutions and report did not, and could not bear the Carolina interpretation. He 
earnestly maintained that the separate action of an individual State was not contem- 
plated by them, and that they had in view nothing but the concerted action of the 
States to procure the repeal of unconstitutional laws or an amendment of the Con- 
stitution.* 

With one such letter written with this intent, I was myself honored. It filled 
ten pages of the journal in which with his permission it was published. It unfi)lded 
the true theory of the Constitution and the meaning and design of the rcsolutionsi, 
and exposed the folse gloss attempted to be placed upon them by the Nullifiers, 
with a clearness and force of reasoning which defied refutation. None, to my 
knowledge, was ever attempted. The politicians of the Nullification and Secession 
school, as far as I am aware, have from that day to this made no attempt to grapple 
with ^Ir. Madison's letter of August, 1830.f Mr. Calhoun certainly made no such 
attempt in the elaborate treatise composed by him, mainly fi)r the purpose of ex- 
pounding the doctrine of nullification. He claims the support of these resolutions, 
without adverting to the fact that his interpretation of tlicm had been repudiated 

• A very considerable portion of the important volume containing a selection from the Madison papers, and 
printed "esclusively for private distribution" by J. C. McGuire, Esq., in 1S63, is taken up with these letters and 
essays. 

t North American Eeview, vol. xxxi., p. 53T. 



22 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

by their illustrious author. He repeats his exploded parodoxes as confidently, as 
if Mr. Madison himself had expired with the Alien and Sedition laws, and loft no 
testimony to the meaning of his resolutions ; while, at the present day, with equal 
confidence, the same resolutions are appealed to by the disciples of Mr. Calhoun 
as sustaining the doctrine of secession, in the face of the positive declaration of 
their author, when that doctrine first began to be broached, that they will bear no 
such interpretation. 

MR. CALHOUN DID NOT CLAIM A CONSTITUTIONAL EIGHT OF SECESSION. 

In this respect the disciples hare gone beyond the master. There is a single 
sentence in Mr. Calhoun's elaborate volume in which he maintains the right of a 
State to secede from the Union. (Page 801.) There is reason to suppose, how- 
ever, that he intended to claim only the inalienable right of revolution. In 1828, 
a declaration of political principles was drawn up by him for the State of South 
Carolina, in which it was expressly taught, that the people of that State by adopt- 
ing the Federal Constitution had " modified its original right of sovereignty, 
whereby its individual consent was necessary to any change in its political con- 
dition, and by becoming a member of the Union, had placed that power in the 
hands of three-fourths of the States, [the number necessary for a Constitutional 
amendment,] in whom the highest power known to the Constitution actually re- 
sides." In a recent patriotic speech of Mr. Reverdy Johnson, at Frederick, Md., 
on the 7th of May, the distinct authority of Mr. Calhoun is quoted as late as 1844 
against the right of separate action on the part of an individual State, and I am 
assured by the same respected gentleman, that it is within his personal knowledge, 
that Mr. Calhoun did not maintain the peaceful right of secession.* 

SECESSION AS A EEVOLUTION. 

But it may be thought a waste of time to argue against a Constitutional right 
of peaceful Secession, since no one denies the right of Revolution ; and no pains 
are spared by the disaffected leaders, while they claim indeed the Constitutional 
right, to represent their movement as the uprising of an indignant People against 
an oppressive and tyrannical Government. 

IS THE GOVEENMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OPPEESSIVE AND TTEANNICAL ? 

An oppressive and tyrannical government ! Let us examine this pretence for 
a few moments, first in the general, and then in the detail of its alleged tyrannies 
and abuses. 

This oppressive and tyrannical Government is the successful solution of a prob- 
lem, which had tasked the sagacity of mankind from the dawn of civilization ; viz. : 
to find a form of polity, by which institutions purely popular could be extended 
over a vast empire, free alike from despotic centralization and undue preponder- 
ance of the local powers. It was necessarily a complex system ; a Union at once 
federal and national. It leaves to the separate States the control of all matters 
of purely local administration, and confides to the central power the management 
of Foreign aflliirs and of all other concerns in which the United family have a joint 
interest. All the organized and delegated powers depend directly or very nearly 

* See Appendix E. 



IS THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES TYRANNICAL? 23 

so on popular choice. Tliis Government was not imposed upon the People by a 
foreign conqueror ; it is not an inheritance descending from barbarous ages, laden 
with traditionary abuses, which create a painful ever-recurring necessity of reform ; 
it is not the conceit of heated enthusiasts in the spasms of a revolution. It is the 
recent and voluntary frame-work of an enlightened age, compacted by wise and 
good men, with deliberation and care, working upon materials prepared by long 
Colonial discipline. In framing it, they sought to combine the merits and to avoid 
the defects of former systems of government. The greatest possible liberty of the 
citizen is the basis ; just representation the ruling principle, reconciling with rare 
ingenuity the federal equality of the States, Avith the proportionate influence of 
numbers. Its legislative and executive magistrates are freely chosen at short 
periods ; its judiciary alone holding office by a more permanent, but still sufficiently 
responsible, tenure. No money flows into or out of the Treasury but under the 
direct sanction of the representatives of the People, on whom also ail the great 
functions of Government for peace and war, within the limits already indicated, 
are devolved. No hereditary titles or privileges, no distinction of ranks, no 
established church, no courts of high commission, no censorship of the press, are 
known to the system ; not a drop of blood has ever flowed under its authority for 
a political offence ; but this tyrannical and oppressive Government has certainly 
exhibited a more perfect development of equal republican principles, than has ever 
before existed on any considerable scale. Under its benign influence, the country, 
every part of the country, has prospered beyond all former example. Its popula- 
tion has increased ; its commerce, agriculture, and manufactures have flourished ; 
manners, arts, education, letters, all that dignifies and ennobles man, have in a 
shorter period attained a higher point of cultivation than has ever before been 
witnessed in a newly settled region. The consequence has been consideration and 
influence abroad and marvellous well-being at home. The world has looked with 
admiration upon the Country's progress ; we have ourselves contemplated it, per- 
haps, with undue self-complacency. Armies without conscription ; navies without 
impressment, and neither army nor navy swelled to an oppressive size ; an over- 
flowing treasury without direct taxation or oppressive taxation of any kind ; 
churches without number and with no denominational preferences on the part of the 
State ; schools and colleges accessible to all the people ; a free and a cheap press ; 
— all the great institutions of social life extending their benefits to the mass of the 
community. Such, no one can deny, is the general character of this oppressive 
and tyrannical government. 

But perhaps this Government, how'ever wisely planned, however beneficial even 
in its operation, may have been rendered distasteful, or may have become oppres- 
sive in one part of the coimtry and to one portion of the people, in consequence of 
the control of affliirs having been monopolized or unequally shared by another 
portion. In a Confederacy, the people of one section are not well pleased to be 
even mildly governed by an exclusive domination of the other. In point of fact 
this is the allegation, the persistent allegation of the South, that from the founda- 
tion of the Government it has been wielded by the people of the North for their 
special, often exclusive, benefit, and to the injury and oppression of the South. Let 
us see. Out of seventy-two years since the organization of the Government, the 
Executive chair has, for sixty-four years, been filled nearly all the time by Southern 



24 ADDRESS JbV EDWARD EVERETT. 

Presidents ; and when that was not the case, by Presidents possessing the confidence 
of the South. For a still longer period, the controlling influences of the Legislative 
and Judicial departments of the Government have centred in the same quarter. Of 
ail the offices in the gift of the central power in every department, far more than 
her proportionate share has always been enjoyed by the South. She is at this 
moment revolting against a Government, not only admitted to be the mildest and 
most beneficent ever organized this side Utopia, but one of which she has herself 
from the first, almost monopolized the administration. 

CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION ALLEGED BY SOUTH CAKOLINA. 

But are there no wrongs, abuses, and oppressions, alleged to have been suffered 
by the South, which have rendered her longer submission to the Federal Govern- 
ment intolerable, and which are jileaded as the motive and justification of the 
revolt ? Of course there are, but with such variation and uncertainty of statement 
as to render their examination difficult. The manifesto of South Carolina of the 
20th of Dec. last, which led the way in this inauspicious movement, sets forth noth- 
ing but the passage of State laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive slaves. The 
document does not state that South Carolina herself ever lost a slave in consequence 
of these laws, it is not probable she ever did, and yet she makes the existence of 
these laws, which are wholly inoperative as far as she is concerned, and which 
probably never caused to the entire South the loss of a dozen fugitives, the ground 
for breaking up the Union and plunging the country into a civil war. But I shall 
2)resently revert to this topic. 

Other statements in other quarters enlarge the list of grievances. In the month 
of November last, after the result of the presidential election was ascertained, a 
very interesting discussion of the subject of secession took place at Milledgeville, 
before the members of the Legislature of Georgia and the citizens generally, be- 
tween two gentlemen of great ability and eminence, since elected, the one Secretary 
of State, the other Vice-President of the new Confederacy ; the former urging the 
necessity and duty of immediate secession ; — the latter opposing it. I take the 
grievances and abuses of the Federal Government, which the South has suffered at 
the hands of the North, and which were urged by tlie former speaker as the grounds 
of secession, as I find them stated and to some extent answered by his friend and 
fellow-citizen (then opposed to secession) according to the report in the !Milledge- 
ville papers. 

CAUSES ALLEGED BY GEORGIA: THE FISHING BOUNTIES. 

And what, think you, was the grievance in the front rank of those oppressions 
on the part of the North, which have driven the long-suffering and patient South to 
open rebellion against " the best Government that the history of the world gives 
any account of" ? It was not that upon which the Convention of South Carolina 
relied. You will hardly believe it ; posterity will surely not believe it. " We 
listened," said Mr. Vice-President Stephens, in his reply, " to my honorable friend 
last night, (Mr. Toombs,) as he recounted the evils of this Government. The first 
was the fishing bounties 2mid mostly to the sailors of Neio England^ The bounty 
paid by the Federal Government to encourage the deep-sea fisheries of the United 
States ! 



CAUSES ALLEGED BY GEORGIA: THE FISHING BOUNTIES. 25 

You are aware that this laborious branch of industry lias, by all maritime 
States, been ever regarded with special favor as tlie nursery of naval power. The 
fisheries of the American colonies before the American Revolution drew from Burke 
one of the most gorgeous bursts of eloquence in our language, — in any language. 
They were all but annihilated by the Revolution, but they furnished the men who 
followed Manly, and Tucker, and Biddle, and Paul Jones to the jaws of death. Re- 
viving after the war, they attracted the notice of the First Congress, and were 
recommended to their favor by Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State. This favor 
was at first extended to them in the shape of a draw-back of the duty on the various 
imported articles employed in the building and outfit of the vessels and on the 
foreign salt used in preserving the fish. The complexity of this arrangement led to 
the substitution at first of a certain bounty on the quantity of the fish exported ; 
afterwards on the tonnage of the vessels employed in the fisheries. All administra- 
tions have concurred in the measure ; Presidents of all parties, — though there has 
not been much variety of party in that office, — have approved the appropriations. 
If the North had a local interest in these bounties, the South got the principal food 
of her laboring population so much the cheaper ; and she had her common share in 
the protection which the navy afforded her coasts, and in the glory which it shed on 
the flag of the country. But since, unfortunately, the deep-sea fisheries do not exist 
in the Gulf of Mexico, nor, as in the " age of Pyrrha," on the top of the Blue Ridge, 
it has been discovered of late years that these bounties are a violation of the Con- 
stitution ; a largess bestowed by the common treasury on one section of the coun- 
tr}'", and not shared by the other ; one of the hundred ways, in a word, in which the 
rapacious North is fattening upon the oppressed and pillaged South. You will 
naturally wish to know the amount of this tyrannical and oppressive bounty. It is 
stated by a senator from Alabama (!Mr. Clay) who has warred against it with per- 
severance and zeal, and succeeded in the last Congress in carrying a bill through 
the Senate for its repeal, to have amounted, on the average, to an annual sum of 
200,005 dollars ! Such is the portentous grievance which in Georgia stands at the 
head of the acts of oppression, for which, although repealed in one branch of Congress, 
the Union is to be broken up, and the country desolated by war. Switzerland 
revolted because an Austrian tyrant invaded the sanctity of her firesides, crushed 
out the eyes of aged patriots, and compelled her fiithers to shoot apples from the 
heads of her sons ; the Low Countries revolted against the fires of the Inquisition, 
and the infernal cruelties of Alva ; our fathers revolted because they were taxed by 
a parliament in which they were not represented ; the Cotton States revolt because 
a paltry subvention is paid to the hardy fishermen who form the nerve and muscle 
of the American Navy. 

But it is not, we shall be told, the amount of the bounty, but the principle, as 
our fathers revolted against a three-penny tax on tea. But that was because it was 
laid by a parliament in which the Colonies were not rcpresenteil, and which yet 
claimed the right to bind them in all cases. The Fishing Bounty is bestowed by a 
Government which has been from the first controlled by the South. Then how 
unreasonable to expect or to wish, that, in a country so vast as ours, no public ex- 
penditure should be made for the immediate benefit of one part or one interest 
that cannot be identically repeated in every other. A liberal policy, or rather the 
necessity of the case, demands, that what the public good, upon the whole, requires, 



26 A.DDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

should under constitutional limitations be done where it is required, offsettinf the 
local benefit -which may accrue from the expenditure made in one place and for one 
object, with the local benefit from the same source, in some other place for some other 
object. More money was expended by the United States in removing the Indians 
from Georgia, eight or ten times as much was expended for the same object in Florida, 
as has been paid for Fishing Bounties in seventy years. For the last year, to pay 
for the expense of the post-oflice in the seceding States, and enable our fellow-citi- 
zens there to enjoy the comforts of a newspaper and letter mail to the same 
extent as they are enjoyed in the other States, three millions of dollars were 
paid from the common Treasury. The post-office bounty paid to the seceding 
States exceeded seventeen fold the annual average amount of the Fishing Bounty 
paid to the North. In four years that excess would equal the sum total of the 
amount paid since 1792 in bounties to the deep-sea fishery ! This circumstance 
probably explains the fact, that the pride of the Southern Confederacy was not 
alarmed at having the mails still conveyed by the United States, three or four 
months after the forts had been seized, the arsenals emptied, and the mints plun- 
dered. 

NAYIGATION LAWS. 

The second of the grievances under which the South is laboring, and which, ac- 
cording to J\Ir. Stephens, was on the occasion alluded to pleaded by the Secretary 
of State of the new Confederacy as a ground for dissolving the Union, is the Naviga- 
tion Laws, which give to American vessels the exclusive enjoyment of our own 
coasting trade. This also is a policy coeval with the Government of the United 
States, and universally adopted by maritime powers, though relaxed by EnglanrJ 
within the last few years. Like the fishing bounty, it is a policy adopted for the 
purpose of fostering the commercial and with that the naval marine of the United 
States. All administrations of all parties have favored it ; under its influence our 
commercial tonnage has grown up to be second to no other in the world, and our 
navy has proved itself adequate to all the exigencies of peace and war. And are 
these no objects in a national point of view ? Are the seceding politicians really 
insensible to interests of such paramount national importance 1 Can they, for the 
sake of an imaginary infinitesimal reduction of coastwise freights, be willing to rua 
even the risk of impairing our naval prosperity 1 Are they insensible to the iact 
that nothing but the growth of the American commercial marine protects the entire 
freighting interest of the country, in Vv'hich the South is more deeply interested than 
the North, from European monopoly 1 The South did not always take so narrow 
a view of the subject. When the Constitution was framed, and the American Mer- 
chant Marine was inconsiderable, the discrimination in favor of United States ves- 
sels, which then extended to the foreign trade, was an object of some apprehension 
on the part of the planting States. But there were statesmen in the South at that 
day, who did not regard the shipping interest as a local concern. '• So far " said 
Mr. Edward Rutledge, in the South Carolina Convention of 1788, " from not pre- 
ferring the Northern States by a navigation act, it would be politic to increase their 
strength by every means in our power ; for we had no other resource in our day 
of danger than in the naval force of our Northern friends, nor could we ever expect 
to become a great nation till we were powerful on the waters."* But " powerful 

Elliott's Debates, vol. iv., p. 2M. 



THE TARIFF. 27 

on the waters " the South can never be. She has live oak, naval stores, and gallant 
officers ; but her climate and its diseases, the bars at the mouth of nearly all her 
harbors, the Teredo, the want of a merchant marine and of fisheries, and the char- 
•leter of her laboring population, will forever prevent her becoming a great naval 
power Without the protection of the Navy of the United States, of which the 
stren<rth centres at the North, she would hold the ingress and egress of every port 
on he°r coast at the mercy, I will not say of the great mantime States of Europe, 
but of Holland, and Denmark, and Austria, and Spain-of any second or third-rate 
power, which can keep a few steam frigates at sea. 

It must be confessed, however, that there is a sad congruity between the conduct 
of our secedin<r fellow-citizens and the motives which they assign for it. They 
attempt a suicidal separation of themselves from a great naval power, of which they 
are now an integral part, and they put forward, as the reason for this self-destruc- 
tive course, the legislative measures which have contributed to the growth of the 
navy A judicious policy designed to promote that end has built up the commer- 
cial and military n^arine of the Union to its present commanding stature and 
povver • the South, though unable to contribute any thing to its prosperity but the 
service' of her naval officers, enjoys her full share of the honor which it reflects on 
the country, and the protection which it extends to our flag, our coasts, and our 
commerce, but under the influence of a narrow-minded sectional jealousy, she is 
M'illing to abdicate the noble position which she now fills among the nations ot 
the earth' to depend for her very existence on the exigencies of the cotton market, 
to live upon the tolerance of the navies of Europe, and she assigns as leading causes 
for this amazing fatuity, that the Northern fisheries have been encouraged by a 
triflincr bounty, and that the Northern commercial marine has the monopoly of the 
coastwise trade. And the politicians, who, for reasons like these, almost too frivo- 
lous to merit the time we have devoted to their examination, are sapping a noble 
framework of government, and drenching a foir and but for them prosperous coun- 
try in blood appeal to the public opinion of mankind for the justice of their cause, 
and the purity of their motives, and lift their eyes to Heaven for a blessing on 

But the tarifi" is, with one exception, the alleged monster wrong— for which 
South Carolina in 1832 drove the Union to the verge of a civil war, and which, next 
to the slavery question, the South has been taught to regard as the most grievous 
of the oppressions which she suff-ers at the hands of the North, and that by which 
she seeks to win the sympathy of the manufacturing States of Europe. It was so 
treated in the debate referred to. I am certainly not going so far to abuse your 
patience, as to enter into a discussion of the constitutionality or expediency of the 
protective policy, on which I am aware that opinions at the North differ, nor do I 
deem it necessary to expose the utter follacy of the monstrous paradox, that duties, 
enhancing the price of imported articles, are paid, not by the consumer of the mer- 
chandise imported, but by the producer of the last article of export given in cx- 
chaucre. It is sufficient to sav that for this maxim, (the forty-bale theory so called,) 
which has o-rown into an article of faith at the South, not the slightest authority 
ever has been, to my knowledge, adduced from any political economist of any 
school Indeed, it can be shown to be a shallow sophism, inasmuch as the consumer 



28 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

must be, directly or iixlirectly, the jjroducer of the equivalents given in exchange foi 
the article he consumes. But without entering into this discussion, I shall make a 
few remarks to show the great injustice of representing the protective system as 
being in its origin an oppression, of which the South has to complain on the part 
of the North, 

Every such suggestion is a complete inversion of the truth of history. Some 
attempts at manufocturcs by machinery were made at the North before the Revo- 
lution, but to an inconsiderable extent. The maiiuflxcturing system as a great 
Northern interest is the child of the restrictive policy of 1807 — 1812, and of the 
war. That policy was pursued against the earnest opposition of the North, and to 
the temporary prostration of their commerce, navigation, and fisheries. Their 
capital was driven in this way into manufactures, and on the return of peace, the 
foundations of the protective system were laid in the square yard duty on cotton 
flibrics, in the support of which Mr. Calhoun, advised that the growth of the manu- 
facture would open a new market for the staple of the South, took the lead. As 
late as 1821 the Legislature of South Carolina unanimously affirmed the constitu- 
tionality of protective duties, though denying their expediency, — and of all the 
States of the Union Louisiana has derived the greatest benefit from this policy ; in 
fact, she owes the sugar culture to it, and has for that reason given it her steady 
stipport. In all the tariff battles while I was a member of Congress, few rotes 
were surer for the policy than that of Louisiana. If the duty on an article imported 
is considered as added to its price in our market, (which, however, is far from being 
invariably the case.) the sugar duty, of late, has amounted to a tax of five millior.s 
of dollars annually paid by the consumer, for the benefit of the Louisiana planter. 

As to its being an unconstitutional policy, it is perfectly well known that the 
protection of manufoctures was a leading and avowed object forHhe formation of the 
Constitution. The second law, passed by Congress after its formation, was a rev- 
enue law. Its preamble is as follows : " Whereas it is necessary for the support 
of Government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encour- 
agement and protection of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares, and 
-merchandise imported." That act was reported to the House of Representatives 
by ]\Ir. Madison, who is entitled as much as any one to be called the fother of the 
Constitution. While it was pending before the House, and in the first Aveek of the 
first session of the first Congress, two memorials were presented praying for pro- 
tective duties ; and it is a matter of some curiosity to inquire, from what part of 
the country this first call came for that policy, now put forward as one of the acts 
of Northern oppression, which justify the South in flying to arms. The first of 
these petitions was from Baltimore. It implored the new Government to lay a 
protecting duty on all articles imported from abroad, which can be manufactured at 
home. The second was from the shipwrights, not of New York, not of Boston, not 
of Portland, but of Charleston, South Carolina, praying for " such a general regula- 
tion of trade and tlie establishment of such a Navigation Act, as Avill relieve the 
particular distresses of the petitioners, in common with those of their fellow-ship- 
wrights throughout the Union " ! and if South Carolina had always been willing to 
make common cause with their fellow-citizens throughout tho Union, it would noi 
now be rent by civil war. 



THE COTTON CULTURE INTRODUCED UNDER PROTECTION. 09 

THE COTTON CULTURE INTRODUCED UNDER PROTECTION. 

But the history of the great Southern staple is most curious and instructive. 
His Majesty " King Cotton," on his throne, does not seem to be aware of the in- 
fluences which surrounded his cradle. The culture of cotton, on any considerable 
scale, is well known to be of recent date in America. The household manufacture 
of cotton was coeval with the settlement of the country. A century before the 
piano-forte or the harp was seen on this continent, the music of the spinning- 
wheel was heard at every fire-side in town and country. The raw materials Avere 
wool, flax, and cotton, the last imported from the West Indies. The colonial sys- 
tem of Great Britain before the Revolution forbade the establishment of any other 
than household manufactures. Soon after the Revolution, cotton mills were erected 
in Rhode Island and Llassachusetts, and the infant manuflicture was encouraged by 
State duties on the imported fabric. The raw material was still derived exclusively 
from the West Indies. Its culture in this country was so extremely limited and so 
little known, that a small parcel sent from the United States to Liverpool in 1784 
was seized at the custom-house there, as an illicit importation of British colonial 
produce. Even as late as 1794, and by persons so intelligent as the negotiators of 
Jay's treaty, it was not known that cotton was an article of growth and export from 
the United States. In the twelfth article of that treaty, as laid before the Senate, 
Cotton was included with Molasses, Sugar, Coffee, and Cocoa, as articles which 
American vessels should not be permitted to carry from the islands or from the 
United States to any foreign country. 

In the Revenue law of 1789, as it passed through the House of Representatives, 
cotton, with other raw materials, was placed on the free list. When the bill reached 
the Senate a duty of 3 cents per pound was laid upon cotton, not to encourage, not 
to protect, but to create the domestic culture. On the discussion of this amendment 
in the House, a member from South Carolina declared that " Cotton was in con- 
templation " in South Carolina and Georgia, " and if good seed could be jn'ociired he 
hoped it might succeed.'''' On this hope the amendment of the Senate was concurred 
in, and the duty of three cents per pound was laid on cotton. In 1791, Hamilton, 
in his report on the manufactures, recommended the repeal of this duty, on the 
ground that it was " a very serious impediment to the manuflicture of cotton," but 
his recommendation was disregarded. 

Thus, in the infancy of the cotton manufacture of the North, at the moment 
when they were deprived of the protection extended to them before the Constitution 
by State laws, and while they were struggling against Engli.sh competition under 
the rapidly improving machinery of Arkwright, which it was highly penal to 
export to foreign countries, a heavy burden was laid upon them by this protecting 
duty, to enable the planters of South Carolina and Georgia to explore the tropics 
for a variety of cotton seed adapted to their climate. For seven years at least, and 
probably more, this duty was in every sense of the word a protecting duty. There 
was not a pound of cotton spun, no not for candle-wicks to light the humble 
industry of the cottages of the North, which did not pay this tribute to the South- 
ern planter. The growth of the native article, as we have seen, had not in 1794 
reached a point to be known to Chief Justice Jay as one of actual or probable 
export. As late as 1796, the manufacturers of Brandywine in Delaware petitioned 



80 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

Congress for the repeal of this duty on imported cotton, and the petition was re- 
jected on the Report of a Committee, consisting of a majority from the Southern 
States, on the ground, that " to repeal the duty on raw cotton imported would be 
to damp the growth of cotton in our own country." Radicle and plumule, root and 
stalk, blossom and boll, the culture of the cotton plant in the United States was 
in its infancy the foster-child of the Protective System. 

When therefore the pedigree of King Cotton is traced, he is found to be the 
lineal child of the tariff; called into being by a specific duty ; reared by a tax laid 
upon the manufacturing industry of the North, to create the culture of the raw 
material in tlie South. The Northern manufaetarers of America were slightly pro- 
tected in 1789 because they were too feeble to stand alone. Reared into magni- 
tude under the restrictive system and the war of 1812, they were upheld in 181 G 
because they were too important to be sacrificed, and because the great staple of 
the South had a joint interest in their prosperity. King Cotton alone, not in his 
manhood, not in his adolescence, not in his infancy, but in liis very embryo state, 
was pensioned upon the Treasury, — before the seed from which he sprung was 
cast " in the lowest parts of the earth." In the book of the tariff' " his members were 
written, which in continuance were fasliioned, when as yet there were none of 
them." 

But it was not enough to create the culture of cotton at the South, by taxing the 
manufactures of the North with a duty on the raw material ; the extension of that 
culture and the prosperity which it has conferred upon the South are due to the 
mechanical genius of the North. What says ]\Ir. Justice Johnson of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, and a citizen of South Carolina ? " With regard to the 
utility of this discovery " (the cotton gin of Whitney) " the court would deem it a 
waste of time to dwell long upon this topic. Is there a man who hears us that has 
not experienced its utility ? The whole interior of the Southern States was lan- 
guishing, and its inhabitants emigrating, for want of some object to engage their 
attention and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once 
opened views to them which set the whole country in active motion. From child 
hood to age it has presented us a lucrative employment. Individuals who were 
depressed in poverty and sunk' in idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and 
respectability. Our debts have been j^aid off, our capitals increased, and our lands 
trebled in value. We cannot express the weight of obligation which the country 
owes to this invention ; the extent of it cannot now be seen." — Yes, and when hap- 
pier days shall return, and the South, awakening from her suicidal delusion, shall 
remember who it was that sowed her sunny fields with the seeds of those golden 
crops with which she thinks to rule the world, she will cast a veil of oblivion over 
the memory of the ambitious men who have goaded her to her present madness, 
and will rear a monument of her gratitude in the beautiful City of Elms, over the 
ashes of her greatest benefactor — Eli Whitney. 

INTEEFEKENCE WITH SLAVEUY THE GF.EAT ALLEGED GEIEVANCE. 

But the great complaint of the South, and that which is admitted to be the im- 
mediate occasion of the present revolt, is the alleged interference of the North in 
the Southern institution of slavery ; a subject on which the sensibilities of the two 
sections have been so deeply and fearfully stirred, that it is nearly impossible to 



I 



INTERFERENCE WITH SLAVERY THE GREAT ALLEGED GRIEVANCE. 31 

speak words of impartial truth. As I have already stated, the declaration of South 
Carolina, of the causes which prompted her to secede from the Union, alleged no 
other reason for this movement than the enactment of laws to obstruct the surren- 
der of fugitive slaves. The declaration does not state that South Carolina ever lost 
a slave by the operation of these laws, and it is doubtful whether a dozen from all 
the States have been lost from this cause. A gross error on this subject pervades 
the popular mind at the South. Some hundred of slaves in the aggregate escape 
annually ; some to the recesses of the Dismal Swamp ; some to the everglades of 
Florida • some to the trackless mountain region, which traverses the South ; some 
to the Mexican States and the Indian tribes; some across the free States to 
Canada. The popular feeling of the South ascribes the entire loss to the laws of the 
free States, while it is doubtful >vhether these laws cause any portion of it. The 
public sentiment of the North is not such, of course, as to dispose the comnumi ty 
to obstruct the escape or aid in the surrender of slaves. Neither is .t at the South. 
No one I am told, at the South, not called upon by official duty, joms m the hue 
and cry after a fugitive; and whenever he escapes Irom any States south of tiic 
border tier, it is evident that his flight must have been aided in a community of 
slave-holders. If the North Carolina fugitive escapes through \ irgmia, or the ien- 
nessee fugitive escapes through Kentucky, why are Pennsylvania and Ohio alone 
blamed ^ On this whole subject the grossest injustice is done to the North b le 
is expected to be more tolerant of slavery than the South herself; for while the 
South demands of the North entire acquiescence in the extrcmest doctrines of slave 
pi-oportv, it is a well-known fact, and as such alluded to by Mn Clay in his speech 
on the compromises of 1850, that any man who habitually traffics m this property 
is held in the same infomy at Richmond and New Orleans that he would be at 
Philadelphia or Cincinnati.* _ 

While South Carolina, assigning the cause of secession, confines herself to he 
State laws for obstructing the surrender of fugitives, in other quart..-s, by the 
press, in the manifestoes and debates on the subject of secession, and iii the oflicial 
papers of the new Confederacy, the general conduct of the North, with respect to 
Slavery, is put forward as the justifying, nay, the compelling cause of the revolu- 
tion. This subject, still more than that of the tariff, is too tnte or discussion, with 
the hope of saying any thing new on the general question. I will but submit a fe. 
considerations to show the great injustice which is done to the North, by repre- 
senting her as the aggressor in this sectional warfare. , , n r. 

Tlie Southern theory assumes that, at the time of the adoption of the Constitu- 
tion, the same antagonism prevailed as now between the North and South, on he 
.en^ral subject of Slavery; that, although it existed to some extent in al to 
States but one of the Union, it was a feeble and declining interest at the North 
and mainly seated at the South ; that the soil and climate of the North were soon 
found to be unpropitious to slave labor, while the reverse was the case at the 
South ; that the Northern States, in consequence, having, from -^-^^^'f^^^^ 
abolished Slavery, sold their slaves to the South, and that then ^^^^^^^^^^ 
enee of Slavery was recognized, and its protection guaranteed by ^^e ^-t^tutK n, 
as soon as the Northern States had acquired a control ing ;--/'? Cojies^;^^^^;; 
sistent and organized system of hostile measures, against the rights of the o^^nelS 

• Seo Appendix, C. 



32 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

of slaves in the Southern States, was inaugui-ated and gradually extended, in viola- 
tion of the compromises of the Constitution, as well as of the honor and good faith 
tacitly pledged to the South, by the manner in which the North disposed of her 
slaves. 

Such, in substance, is the statement of j\Ir. Davis in his late message ; and ho 
then proceeds, seemingly as if rehearsing the acts of this Northern majority in 
Congress, to refer to the anti-slavery measures of the State Legislatures, to the 
resolutions of abolition societies, to the passionate appeals of the party press, and 
to the acts of lawless individuals, during the progress of this unhappy agitation. 

THE SOUTH FOEMEKLT OPPOSED TO SLAVERY. 

Now, this entire view of the subject, with whatever boldness it is affirmed, and 
•with whatever persistency it is repeated, is destitute of foundation. It is demon- 
strably •at war with the truth of history, and is contradicted by facts known to 
those now on the stage, or which are matters of recent record. At the time of the 
adoption of the Constitution, and long afterwards, there was, generally speaking, 
no sectional difference of opinion between North and South, on the subject of Sla- 
very. It was in both parts of the country regarded, in the established formula of 
the day, as " a social, political, and moral evil." The general feeling in favor of 
universal liberty and the rights of man, wrought into fervor in the progress of the 
Revolution, naturally strengthened the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the Union. 
It is the South which has since changed, not the North. The theory of a change in 
the Northern mind, growing out of a discovery made soon after 1789, that our soil 
and climate were unpropitious to Slavery, (as if the soil and climate then were 
different from what they had always been,) and a consequent sale to the South of 
the slaves of the North, is purely mythical — as groundless in fact as it is absurd in 
statement. I have often asked for the evidence of this last allegation, and I have 
never found an individual who attemj^ted even to prove it. But however this may 
be, the South at that time regarded Slavery as an evil, though a necessary one, 
and habitually spoke of it in that light. Its continued existence was supposed to 
depend on keeping up the African slave trade ; and South as well as North, Vir- 
ginia as well as Massachusetts, passed laws to prohibit that traffic ; they were, 
however, before the revolution, vetoed by the Royal Governors. One of the first 
acts of the Continental Congress, vnianimously subscribed by its members, was an 
agreement neither to import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first of 
December, 1774. In the Declaration of Independence, as originally drafted by 
Mr. Jefferson, both Slavery and the slave trade were denounced in the most un- 
compromising language. In 1777 the traffic was forbidden in Virginia, by State 
law, no longer subject to the veto of Royal Governors, In 1784, an ordinance was 
reported by IMr. Jefferson to the old Congress, providing that after 1800 there 
should be no Slavery in any Territory, ceded or to be ceded to the United States. 
The ordinance failed at that time to be enacted, but the same prohibiti<)n formed a 
part by general consent of the ordinance of 1787, for the organization of the nortli- 
westem Territory. In his Notes on Virginia, published in that year, ]\Ir. Jefferson 
depicted the evils of Slavery in terms of fearful import. In the same year the 
Constitution was framed. It recognized the existence of Slavery, but the word 
was carefully excluded from the instrument, and Congress was authorized to abol- 



THE SOUTH FORMERLY OPPOSED TO SLAVERY. 33 

ish the traffic iu twenty years. In 179G, Uv. St. George Tucker, law professor in 
William and Mary College in Virginia, published a treatise entitled, '• a Disser- 
tation on Slavery, with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of 
Virginia." In the preface to the essay, he speaks of the " abolition of Slavery 
in this State as an object of the first importance, nut only to our moral character 
and domestic peace, but even to our political salvati(ni." In 1T07 Mr. Pinkney, iu 
the Legislature of Maryland, maintained that "by the eternal principles of justice, 
no man in the State has the right to hold his slave a single hour." In 1803, Mr. 
John Randolph, from a committee on the subject, reported that the prohibition of 
Slavery by the ordinance uf 1787, was '•' a measure v.'isely calculated to promote tlie 
happiness and prosperity of the North-western States, and to give strength and 
security to that extensive frontier." Under Mr. Jefferson, the importation of 
slaves into the Territories of Mississippi and Louisiana was prohibited in advance 
of the time limited by the Constitution for the interdiction of the slave trade. 
When the Missouri restriction was enacted, all the members of Mr. IMonroc's Cab- 
inet—Mr. Crawford of Georgia, Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina, and ISIr. Wirt 
of Virginia — concurred with Mr. IMonroo in affirming its constitutionality. In 
1832, after the Southampton massacre, the evils of Slavery were exposed in the 
Legislature of Virginia, and the expediency of its gradual abolition maintained, in 
terms as decided as were ever employed by the most uncompromising agitator. 
A bill for that object was introduced into the Assembly by the grandson of :Mr. 
Jefferson, and warmly supported by distinguished politicians now on the stage. 
Nay, we have the recent admission of the Vice-President of the seceding Confed- 
eracy, that what he calls " the errors of the past generation.," meaning the anti- 
slavery sentiments entertained by Southern statesmen, "still clung to many as 
late as iiventy years ago." 

To this hasty review of Southern opinions and measures, showing their ac- 
cordance till a late date with Northern sentiment on the subject of Slavery, I might 
add the testimony of Washington, of Patrick Henry, of George Mason, of Wythe, 
of Pendleton, of ]\Iarshall, of Lowndes, of Poinsett, of Clay, and of nearly every 
first-class name in the Southern States. Nay, as late as 1849, and after the Union 
had been shaken by the agitations incident to the acquisition of Mexican territory, 
the Convention of California, although nearly one-half of its members were from 
the slaveholding States, nnanimousbj adopted a Constitution, by which slavery was 
prohibited in that State. In fl^ct, it is now triumphantly proclaimed by the chiefs 
of the revolt, that the ideas prevailing on this subject when the Constitution was 
adopted were fundamentally wrong ; that the new Government of the Confederate 
States " rests upon exactly the opposite ideas ; that its foundations are laid and its 
corner-stone reposes upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white 
man ; that Slavery— subordination to the superior race- is his natural and normal 
condition. This our new Government is the first in the history of the world 
based upon this physical, philosophical, and moral truth." So little foundation is 
there for the statement, that the North, from the first, has been engaged in a strug- 
gle with the South on the subject of Slavery, or has departed in any degree from 
the spirit with which the Union was entered into, by both parties. The fact is 
precisely the reverse. 



34 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

NO ANTI-SLAVERY MEASURES ENACTED BY CONGRESS. 

Mr. Davis, in his message to the Confederate States, goes over a long list of 
measures, which he declares to have been inaugurated, and gradually extended, as 
soon as the Northern States had reached a sufficient number to give their repre- 
sentatives a controlling voice in Congress. But of all these measures, not one is a 
matter of Congressional legislation, nor has Congress, with this alleged controlling 
voice on the part of the North, ever either passed a law hostile to the interests of 
the South, on the subject of Slavery, nor failed to pass one which the South has 
claimed as belonging to her rights or needed for her safety. In truth, the North, 
meaning thereby the anti-slavery North, never has had the control of both Houses 
of Congress, never of the judiciary, rarely of the Executive, and never exerted 
there to the prejudice of Southern rights. Every judicial or legislative issue on 
this question, with the single exception of the final admission of Kansas, that has 
ever been raised before Congress, has been decided in favor of the South ; and yet 
she allows herself to allege " a persistent and organized system of hostile measures 
against the rights of the owners of slaves," as the justification of her rebellion. 

The hostile measures alluded to are, as I have said, none of them matters of 
Congressional legislation. Some of them are purely imaginary as to any injurious 
effect, others much exaggerated, others unavoidably incident to freedom of speech 
and the press. You are aware, my friends, that I have always disapproved the 
agitation of the subject of Slavery for jDarty jjurposes, or with a view to infringe 
upon the Constitutional rights of the South. But if the North has given cause of 
complaint, in this respect, the fault has been equally committed by the South. 
The subject has been fully as much abused there as here for party purposes ; and 
if the North has ever made it the means of gaining a sectional triumph, she has but 
done what the South, for the last twenty -five years, has never missed an occasion 
of doing. With respect to every thing substantial in the complaints of the South 
a£;ainst the North, Congress and the States have afforded or tendered all reason- 
able, all possible satisfaction. She asked for a more stringent fugitive slave law in 
1850, and it was enacted. She comj)lained of the ]\Iissouri Compromise, although 
adopted in conformity with all the traditions of the Government, and approved by 
the most judicious Southern statesmen ; and after thirty-four years' acquiescence on 
the part of the people, Congress repealed it. She wished for a judicial decision of 
the territorial question in her favor, and the Supremo Court of the United States, 
in contravention of the whole current of our legislation, so decided it. She insisted 
on carrying this decision into eflect, and three new Territories, at the very last 
session of Congress, were organized in conformity to it, as Utah and New Mexico 
had been before it was rendered. She demanded a guarantee against amendments 
of the Constitution adverse to her interests, and it was given by the requisite ma- 
jority of the two Houses. She required the repeal of the State laws obstructing 
the surrender of fugitive slaves, and although she had taken the .extreme remedy 
of revolt into her hands, they were repealed or modified. Nothing satisfied her, 
because there was an active party in the cotton-growing States, led by ambitious 
men determined on disunion, who w^ere resolved not to be satisfied. In one in- 
stance alone the South has suflTered defeat. The North, for the first time since the 
foundation of the Government, has chosen a President by her unaided electoral 



REPRESENTATION OF THREE-FIFTHS OF THE SLAVES. 35 

vote ; and that is the occasion of the present unnatural war. I cannot appropriate 
to myself any portion of those cheers, for, as you know, I did not contribute, by 
my vote, to that result ; but I did enlist under the Banner of " the Union, the Con- 
stitution, and the enforcement of the laws." Under that Banner I mean to stand, 
and with it, if it is struck down, I am willing to foil. Even for this result the 
South has no one to blame but herself. Her disunionists would give their votes 
for no candidate but the one selected by leaders who avowed the purpose of effect- 
ing a revolution of the cotton States, and who brought about a schism in the Dem- 
ocratic party directly caclulated, probably designed, to produce the event which 
actually took place, with all its dread consequences. 

EEPKESENTATION OF THREE-FIFTHS OF THE SLAVES. 

I trust I have shown the flagrant injustice of this whole attempt to flisten upon 
the North the charge of wielding the j)owers of the Federal Government to the 
prejudice of the South. But there is one great fact connected with this subject, 
seldom prominently brought forward, which ought forever to close the lips of the 
South, in this warfare of sectional reproach. Under the old Confederation, tlie 
Congress consisted of but one House, and each State, large and small, had but a 
single vote, and consequently an equal share in the Government, if Government it 
could be called, of the Union. This manifest injustice was bai*ely tolerable in a 
state of war, when the imminence of the public danger tended to produce unanimity 
of feeling and action. When the country was relieved from tlie pressure of tlie 
war, and discordant interests more and more disclosed themselves, the equality of 
the States became a j^ositive element of discontent, and contributed its full share 
to the downfall of that short-lived and ill-compacted frame of Government. 

Accordingly, when the Constitution of the United States was formed, the great 
object and the main difficulty was to reconcile the equality of the States, (which 
gave to Rhode Island and Delaware equal weight with Virginia and ^Massachusetts,) 
with a proportionate representation of the people. Each of these principles was 
of vital importance ; the first being demanded by tlie small States, as due to their 
equal independence, and the last being demanded by the large States, in virtue of 
the fact that the Constitution was the work and the Government of the people, and 
in conformity Avith the great law in which the Revolution liad its origin, that repre- 
sentation and taxation should go hand in hand. 

The problem was solved, in the Federal Convention, by a system of extremely 
refined arrangements, of which the chief was that there should be two Houses of 
Congress, that each State should have an equal representation in the Senate, (vot- 
ing, however, not by States, but ^^^e?* capita,^ and a number of representatives in 
the House in proportion to its population. But here a formidable difliculty pre- 
sented itself, growing out of the anomalous character of the population of the slave- 
holding States, consisting as it did of a dominant and a subject class, the latter ex- 
cluded by local law from the enjoyment of all political rights, and regarded simply 
as property. In this state of things, was it just or equitable that the slaveholding 
States, in addition to the number of representatives to which their free population 
entitled them, should have a further share in the government of the country, on 
account of the slaves held as property by a small portion of the ruling class ? 
While property of every kind in the non-slaveholding States was unrepresented, 



36 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

was it just that this species of property, forming a large proportion of the entire 
property of the South, should be allowed to swell the representation of the slave- 
holding States ? 

This serious difliculty was finally disposed of, in a manner mutually satisfactory, 
by providing that Representatives and direct Taxes should be apportioned among 
the States on the same basis of population, ascertained by adding to the whole 
number of free persons three-fifths of the slaves. It was expected at this time that 
the Federal Treasury would be mainly supplied by direct taxation. While, there- 
fore, the rule adopted gave to the South a number of representatives out of propor- 
tion to the number of her citizens, she would be restrained from exercising this 
power to the prejudice of the North, by the fact that any increase of the public 
burdens would fill in the same increased proportion on herself For the additional 
weight which the South gained in the i:)residential election, by this adjustment, the 
North received no compensation. 

But now mark the practical operation of the compromise. Direct taxation, 
instead of being the chief resource of the Treasury, has been resorted to but four 
times since tlie foundation of the Government, and then for small amounts ; in 
1798 two millions of dollars, in 1813 three millions, in 1815 six millions, in 1816 
three millions again, in all fourteen millions, the sum total raised by direct taxation 
in seventy-two years, less than an average of 200,000 dollars a year. What num- 
ber of representatives, beyond the proportion of their free population, the South 
has elected in former Congresses I have not computed. In the last Congress she 
was represented by twenty members, in behalf of her slaves, being nearly one- 
eleventh part of the entire House. As the increasing ratio of the two classes of 
population has not greatly varied, it is probable that the South, in virtue of her 
slaves, has always enjoyed about the same proportionate representation in the 
House, in excess of that accruing from her free population. As it has rarely hap- 
pened in our political divisions that important measures have been carried by large 
majorities, this excess has been quite sufficient to assure the South a majority on 
all sectional questions. It enabled her to elect her candidate for the Presidency in 
1800, and thus effect the great political revolution of that year, and is sufficient of 
itself to account for that approach to a monopoly of the Government which she has 
ever enjoyed. 

Now, though the consideration for which the North agreed to this arrangement, 
may be said to have wholly fliiled, it has nevertheless been quietly acquiesced in. 
I do not mean that in times of high party excitement it has never been alluded to 
as a hardship. The Hartford Convention spoke of it as a grievance which ought to 
be remedied ; but even since our political controversies have turned almost wholly 
on the subject of slavery, I am not aware that this cntii-e failure of the equivalent, 
for which the North gave up to the South what has secured to her, in fact, the 
almost exclusive control of the Government of the country, has been a frequent or a 
prominent subject of comj^laint. 

So much for the j^ursuit by the North of measures hostile to the interests of the 
South ; — so much for the grievances urged by the South as her justification for 
bringing upon the country the crimes and sufferings of civil war, and aiming at the 
prostration of a Government admitted by herself to be the most perfect the world 
has seen, and under which all her own interests have been eminently protected and 



WHY SHOULD WE NOT RECOGNIZE THE SECEDING STATES? 37 

favored ; for to complete the demonstration of the unreasonableness of her com- 
plaints, it is necessary only to add, that, by the admission of her leading public 
men, there never was a time when her " peculiar institution " was so stable and 
prosperous as at the present moment.* 

WHY SHOULD WE NOT EECOGNIZE THE SECEDING STATES? 

And now let us rise from these disregarded appeals to the truth of history and 
the wretched subtilties of the Secession School of Argument, and contemplate the 
great issue before us, in its solemn practical reality, " Why should wc not," it is 
asked, " admit the claims of the seceding States, acknowledge their independence, 
and put an end at once to the war 1 " " Why should we not ? " I answer the 
question by asking another : " Why should we ? " What have we to gain, what to 
hope from the pursuit of that course ? Peace'? But we were at peace before. 
Why are we not at peace now ? The North has not waged the war, it has been 
forced upon us in self defence ; and if, while they had the Constitution and the 
Laws, the Executive, Congress, and the Courts, all controlled by themselves, the 
South, dissatisfied with legal protections and Constitutional remedies, has grasped 
the sword, can North and South hope to live in peace, when the bonds of Union arc 
broken, and amicable means of adjustment are repudiated? Peace is the very last 
thing which Secession, if recognized, will give us ; it will give us nothing but a 
hollow truce, — time to prepare the means of new outrages. It is in its very nature 
a perpetual cause of hostility ; an eternal never-cancelled letter of marque and 
reprisal, an everlasting proclamation of border-war. How can peace exist, when all 
the causes of dissension shall be indefinitely multiplied ; when unequal revenue 
laws shall have led to a gigantic system of smuggling; when a general stampede of 
slaves shall take place along the border, with no thought of rendition, and all the 
thousand causes of mutual irritation shall be called into action, on a frontier of 1,500 
miles not marked by natural boundaries and not subject to a common jurisdiction 
or a mediating power ? We did believe in peace, fondly, credulously, believed 
that, cemented by the mild umpirage of the Federal Union, it might dwell forever 
beneath the folds of the Star-Spangled Banner, and the sacred shield of a common 
Nationality, That was the great arcanum of policy ; that was the State mystery 
into which men and angels desired to look ; hidden from ages, but revealed to 

us : — 

Which Kings and Prophets waited for, 
And sought, but never found : 

a family of States independent of each other for local concerns, united under one 
Government for the management of common interests and the prevention of internal 
feuds. There was no limit to the possible extension of such a system. It had 
already comprehended half of North America, and it might, in the course of time, 
have folded the continent in its peaceful, beneficent embrace. We fondly dreamed 
that, in the lapse of ages, it would have been extended till half the Western hemi- 
sphere had realized the vision of universal, perpetual peace. From that dream we 
have been rudely startled by the array of ten thousand armed men in Charleston 
Harbor, and the glare of eleven batteries bursting on the torn sky of the Union, 
like the comet which, at this very moment, burns " In the Arctic sky, and from his 

* See Appendix, D. 



38 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

horrid hair shakes pestilence and war." These batteries rained their storm of iron 
hail on one poor siege-worn company, because, in obedience to lawful authority, in 
the performance of sworn duty, the gallant Anderson resolved to keep his oath. 
That brave and faithful band, by remaining at their post, did not hurt a hair of the 
head of a Carolinian, bond or free. The United States proposed not to reenforce, 
but to feed them. But the Confederate leaders would not allow them even the poor 
boon of being starved into surrender ; and because some laws had been passed 
somewhere, by which it was alleged that the return of some slaves (not one from 
Carolina) had been or might be obstructed, South Carolina, disclaiming the protec- 
tion of courts and of Congress, which had never been withheld from her, has in- 
augurated a ruthless civil war. If, for the frivolous reasons assigned, the seceding 
States have chosen to plunge into this gulf, while all the peaceful temperaments and 
constitutional remedies of the Union were within their reach, and offers of further 
compromise and additional guarantees were daily tendered them, what hope, what 
possibility of peace can there be, when the Union is broken up, when, in addition 
to all other sources of deadly quarrel, a general exodus of the slave population 
begins, (as, beyond all question, it will,) and nothing but war remains for the set- 
tlement of controversies 1 The Vice-President of the new Confederacy states that 
it rests on slavery ; but from its very nature it must rest equally on war ; eternal 
war, first between North and South, and then between the smaller fragments into 
which some of the disintegrated parts may crumble. The work of demons has 
already begun. Besides the hosts mustered for the capture or destruction of 
Washington, Eastern Virginia has let loose the dogs of war on the loyal citizens 
of Western Virginia ; they are straining at the leash in Maryland and Kentucky ; 
Tennessee threatens to set a price on the head of her noble Johnson and his friends ; 
a civil war rages in Missouri. Why, in the name of Heaven, has not Western 
Virginia, separated from Eastern Virginia by mountain ridges, by climate, by the 
course of her rivers, by the character of her population, and the nature of her in- 
dustry, why has she not as good a right to stay in the Union which she inherited 
from her Washington, as Eastern Virginia has to abandon it for the mushroom 
Confederacy forced upon her from Montgomery ? Are no rights sacred but those of 
rebellion ; no oaths binding but those taken by men already foresworn ; are liberty 
of thought, and speech, and action nowhere to be tolerated except on the part of 
those by whom laws are trampled under foot, arsenals and mints plundered, gov- 
ernments warred against, and where their patriotic defenders arc assailed by fero- 
cious and murderous mobs ? 

SECESSION ESTABLISHES A FOREIGN POWER ON THE CONTINENT. 

Then consider the monstrous nature and reach of the pretensions in which we 
are expected to acquiesce ; which are nothing less than that the United States should 
allow a Foreign Poweu, by surprise, treachery, and violence, to possess itself of 
one-half of their territory and all the public property and public establishments 
contained in it ; for if the Southern Confederacy is recognized, it becomes a Foreign 
Power, established along a curiously dove-tailed frontier of 1,500 miles, command- 
ing some of the most important commercial and military positions and lines of 
communication for travel and trade ; half the sea-coast of the Union ; the naviga- 
tion of our Mediterranean Sea, (the Gulf of Mexico, one-third as large as the Medi- 



IMMENSE COST OF THE TERKITORIES CLAIMED BY SECESSION, 39 

terranean of Europe,) and, above all, the great arterial inlet into the heart of the 
Continent, through which its very life-blood pours its imperial tides. I say we are 
coolly summoned to surrender all this to a Foreign Power. Would we surrender 
it to England, to France, to Spain ? Not an inch of it ; why, then, to the Southern 
Confederacy 1 Would any other Government on earth, unless compelled by the 
direst necessity, make such a surrender ? Does not France keep an army of 
100,000 men in Algeria to prevent a few wandering tribes of Arabs, a recent con- 
quest, from asserting their independence ? Did not England strain her resources 
to the utmost tension, to prevent the native Kingdoms of Central India (civilized 
States two thousand years ago, and while painted chieftains ruled the savage clana 
of ancient Britain) from reestablishing their sovereignty ; and shall we be expected, 
without a struggle, to abandon a great integral part of the United States to a For- 
eign Power 1 

Let it be remembered, too, that in granting to the seceding States, jointly and 
severally, the right to leave the Union, we concede to them the right of resuming, if 
they please, their former allegiance to England, France, and Spain. It rests with 
them, with any one of them, if the right of secession is admitted, again to plant a 
European Government side by side with that of the United States on the soil of 
America ; and it is by no means the most improbable upshot of this ill-starred 
rebellion, if allowed to prosper. Is this the Monroe doctrine for which the United 
States have been contending ? The disunion press in Virginia last year openly 
encouraged the idea of a French Protectorate, and her Legislature has, I believe, 
sold out the James River canal, the darling enterprise of Washington, to a com- 
pany in France supposed to enjoy the countenance of the emperor. The seceding 
patriots of South Carolina were understood by the correspondent of the London 
" Times," to admit that they would rather be subject to a British prince, than to 
the Government of the United States. Whether they desire it or not, the moment 
the seceders lose the protection of the United States, they hold their independence 
at the mercy of the powerful governments of Europe. If the navy of the North 
should withdraw its protection, there is not a Southern State on the Atlantic or the 
Gulf, which might not be recolonized by Europe, in six months after the outbreak 
of a foreign war. 

IMMENSE COST OF THE TEEEITOKIES CLAIMED BY SECESSION. 

Then look at the case for a moment, in reference to the cost of the acquisitions 
of territory made on this side of the continent within the present century, — Florida, 
Louisiana, Texas, and the entire coast of Alabama and Mississippi ; vast regions 
acquired from France, Spain, and Mexico, within sixty j^oars. Louisiana cost 
15,000,000 dollars, when our population was 5,000,000, representing, of course, a 
burden of 90,000,000 of dollars at the present day. Florida cost 5,000,000 dollars 
in 1820, when our population was less than 10,000,000, equal to 15,000,000 dollars 
at the present day, besides the expenses of General Jackson's war in 1818, and the 
Florida war of 1840, in which some 80,000,000 of dollars were thrown away, for the 
purpose of driving out a handful of starving Seminoles from the Everglades. 
Texas cost $200,000,000 expended in the Mexican war, in addition to the lives of 
thousands of brave men ; besides 110,000,000 paid to her in 1850, for ceding a 
tract of land which was not hers to New Mexico. A great part of the expense of 



40 ADDRESS BY EDWARD EVERETT. 

the military establishment of the United States has heen incurred iu defendiiig the 
South-Western frontier. The troops, meanly surprised and betrayed in Texas, 
were sent there to protect her defenceless border settlements from the tomahawk 
and scalping-knife. If to all this expenditure we add that of the forts, the navy 
yards, the court-houses, the custom-houses, and the other j^ublic buildings in these 
regions, 500,000,000 dollars of the public funds, of which at least five-sixths have 
been levied by mdircct taxation from the North and North-Wcst, have been ex- 
pended in and for the Gulf States in this century. Would England, would France, 
would any government on the flxce of the earth surrender, without a death-struggle, 
such a dear-bought territory ? 

THE UNITED STATES CANNOT GIVE IIP THE CONTEOL OF THE OUTLET OP 

THE MISSISSIPPI. 

But of this I make no account; the dollars are spent; let them go. But look at 
the subject for a moment in its relations to the safety, to the prosperity, and the 
growth of the country. The Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, with their hundred 
tributaries, give to the great central basin of our continent its character and destiny. 
The outlet of this mighty system lies between the States of Tennessee and Missouri, 
of Mississippi and Arkansas, and through the State of Louisiana. The ancient 
province so-called, the proudest monument of the mighty monarch whose name it 
bears, passed from the jurisdiction of France to that of Spain in 1763. Spain 
coveted it, not that she might fill it with prosperous colonies and rising States, but 
(^hat it might stretch as a broad waste barrier, infested with warlike tribes, between 
the Anglo-American power and the silver mines of Mexico. With the independence 
of the United States, the fear of a still more dangerous neighbor grew upon Spain, 
and in the insane expectation of checking the progress of the Union westward, she 
threatened, and at times attempted, to close the mouth of the Mississippi, on the 
rapidly increasing trade of the West. The bare suggestion of such a policy roused 
the population upon the banks of the Ohio, then inconsiderable, as one man. Their 
confidence in V/ashington scarcely restrained them from rushing to the seizure of 
New Orleans, when the treaty of San Lorenzo El Real in 1795 stipulated f )r them 
a precarious right of navigating the noble river to the sea, with a right of deposit at 
New Orleans. This subject was for years the turning point of the politics of the 
West, and it was perfectly well understood, that, sooner or later, she would be 
content with nothing less than the sovereign control of the mighty stream from its 
head spring to its outlet in the Gulf; and that is as true nozo as it tvas then. 

So stood affairs at the close of the last century, when the colossal power of the 
first Napoleon burst upon the world. In the vast recesses of his Titanic ambition, 
he cherished as a leading object of his policy, to acquire for France a colonial em- 
pire which should balance that of England. In pursuit of this policy, he fixed his 
eye on the ancient regal colony which Louis XIV. had founded in the heart of 
North America, and he tempted Spain by the paltry bribe of creating a kingdom 
of Etruria for a Bourbon prince, to give back to France the then boundless waste 
of the territory of Louisiana. The cession was made by the secret treaty of San 
Ildefonso of the 1st of October, 1800, (of which one sentence only has ever been 
published, but that sentence gave away half a continent,) and the youthful conqueror 
concentrated all the resources of his mighty genius on the accomplishment of the 



CONTROL OF THE OUTLET OF THE MISSISSIPPL 41 

vast project. If successful, it would have established the French power on the 
mouth and on the right bank of the Mississippi, and would have opposed the most 
formidable barrier to the expansion of the United States. The peace of Amiens, at 
this juncture, relieved Napoleon from the pressure of the war with England, and 
every thing seemed propitious to the success of the great enterprise. The fate of 
America trembled for a moment in a doubtful balance, and five hundred thousand 
citizens in that region felt the danger, and sounded the alarm.'^'" 

But in another moment the aspect of afiairs was changed, by a stroke of policy, 
grand, unexpected, and fruitful of consequences, perhaps without a parallel in history. 
The short-lived truce of Amiens was about to end, the renewal of war was inevi- 
table. Napoleon saw that before he could take possession of Louisiana it wouk] 
be wrested from him by England, who commanded the seas, and he determined at 
once, not merely to deprive her of this magnificent conquest, but to contribute as 
far as in him lay, to build up a great rival maritime power in the West. The 
Government of the United States, not less sagacious, seized the golden moment — 
a moment such as does not happen twice in a thousand years. Mr. Jefferson per- 
ceived that, unless acquired by the United States, Louisiana would in a short time 
belong to France or to England, and with equal wisdom and courage he determined 
that it should belong to neither. True he held the acquisition to be unconstitu- 
tional, but he threw to the winds the resolutions of 1798, which had just brought 
him into power ; he broke the CJonstitution and he gained an Empire. Mr. Mon- 
roe was sent to France to conduct the negotiation, in conjunction with Chancellor 
Livingston, the resident Minister, contemplating, however, at that time only the 
acquisition of New Orleans and the adjacent territory. 

But they were dealing with a man that did nothing by halves. Napoleon knew, 
and we knoiu — that to give up the mouth of the river was to give up its course. 
On Easter-Sunday of 1803, he amazed his Council with the announcement, that he 
had determined to cede the whole of Louisiana to the United States. Not less to 
the astonishment of the American envoys, they were told by the French negotia- 
tors, at the first interview, that their master was prepared to treat with them not 
merely for the Isle of New Orleans, but for the whole vast province which bore the 
name of Louisiana ; whose boundaries, then unsettled, have since been carried on 
the North to the British line, on the West to the Pacific Ocean ; a territory half 
as big as Europe, transferred by a stroke of the pen. Fifty-eight years have 
elapsed since the acquisition was made. The States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mis- 
souri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, the territories of Nebraska, Dacotah, Jefferson, 
and part of Colorado, have been established within its limits, on this side of the 
Rocky Mountains ; the State of Oregon and the territory of Washington on their 
western slope ; while a tide of population is steadily pouring into the region, des- 
tined in addition to the natural increase, before the close of the century, to double 
the number oi the States and Territories. For the entire region west of the Al- 
leghanies and east of the Rocky ]\Iountains, the ]\Iissouri and the ^lississippi form 
the natural outlet to the sea. Without counting the population of the seceding 
States, there arc ten millions of the free citizens of the country, between Pittsburg 
and Fort Union, who claim the course and the mouth of the ^Mississippi, as belong- 
ing to the United States. It is theirs by a transfer of truly imperial origin and 

* Speech of Mr. Eoss, in the Senate of the United States, 11th Febniary, 1S03. 



42 ADDRESS BY EDWAliD EVERETT. 

magnitude ; theirs by a sixty years' undisputed title ; theirs by occupation and 
settlement ; theirs by the Law of Nature and of God. Louisiana, a fragment of 
this Colonial empire, detached from its main portion and first organized as a State, 
undertakes to secede from the Union, and thinks by so doing that she will be 
allowed by the Government and People of the United States to revoke this im- 
perial transfer, to disregard this possession and occupation of sixty years, to repeal 
this law of nature and of God ; and she fondly believes that ten millions of the 
Free People of the Union will allow her and her seceding brethren to open and 
shut the portals of this mighty region at their pleasure. They may do so, and the 
swarming millions which throng the course of these noble streams and their tribu- 
taries may consent to exchange the charter which they hold from the God of 
Heaven, for a bit of parchment signed at Montgomery or Richmond ; but if I may 
repeat the words which I have lately used on another occasion, it will be when the 
Alleghanies and the Eocky Mountains, which form the eastern and western walls 
of the imperial valley, shall sink to the level of the sea, and the Mississippi and the 
Missouri shall flow back to their fountains. 

Such, Fellow-citizens, as I contemplate them, are the great issues before the 
country, nothing less, in a word, than whether the work of our noble Fathers of 
the Revolutionary and Constitutional age shall perish or endure ; whether this 
great experiment in National polity, which binds a family of free Republics in one 
United Government — the most hopeful plan for combining the homebred blessings 
of a small State with the stability and power of great empire — shall be treacher- 
ously and shamefully stricken down, in the moment of its most successful opera- 
tion, or whether it shall be bravely, patriotically, triumphantly maintained. We 
wage no war of conquest and subjugation ; we aim at nothing but to protect 
our loyal fellow-citizens, who, against fearful odds, are fighting the battles of the 
Union in the disaffected States, and to reestablish, not for ourselves alone, but for 
our deluded fellow-citizens, the mild sway of the Constitution and the Laws. The re- 
sult cannot be doubted. Twenty millions of freemen, forgetting their divisions, are 
rallying as one man in support of the righteous cause — their willing hearts and 
their strong hands, their fortunes and their lives, are laid upon the altar of th.e 
country. We contend for the great inheritance of constitutional freedom trans- 
mitted from our revolutionary fathers. We engage in the struggle forced upon 
us, with sorrow, as against our misguided brethren, but with high heart and faith, 
as we war for that Union which our sainted Washington commended to our dearesi 
affections. The sympathy of the civilized world is on our side, and will join us in 
prayers to Heaven for the success of our arms. 



APPENDIX. 



APPENDIX A, p. 9. 

Aftee the remarks in the foregoing address, p. 9, were written, touching the impos- 
eibility, at the present day, otre2)eallng tlie instrument by which in 1788 South CaroUna gave 
her consent and ratification to the Constitution of the United States, I souglit the opinion 
on that point of Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, the learned and accurate historian of the Con- 
stitution. It aflorded me great pleasure to find, from the foIlov,-ing letter, that my view 
of the subject is sustained by his high authority: 

Jamaica Plains, i 

Saturday Evening, June 8, ISGl. ) 

My Dear Sir : Since I came home, I have looked carefully at the ratification of the 
Constitution by South Carolina- The formal instrument, sent to Congress, seems to be 
much more in the nature of a Deed or Grant, than of an Ordinance. An ordinance would 
seem to be an instrument adopted by a public body, for the regulation of a subject that in 
its nature remains under the regulation of that body ; — to operate until otherwise ordered. 
A Deed, or Grant, on the other hand, operates to pass some things ; and unless there be 
a reservation of some control over the subject-matter by the Grantor, his cession is neces- 
sarily irrevocable. I can perceive no reason why these distinctions are not applicable to 
the cession of political powers by a People, or their duly authorized representatives. The 
question submitted to the People of South Carolina, by the Congress, Avas, "Whether they 
would cede the powers of government embraced in an instrument sent to them, and called 
the Constitution of the United States. In other words, they were asked to make a Grant 
of those Powers. "When, therefore, the duly authorized Delegates of the People of South 
Carolina executed an instrument under seal, declaring that they, " in the name and be- 
half" of that people, " assent to and ratify the said Constitution," I can perceive no pro- 
priety in calling this Deed an Ordinance. If they had adopted an instrument entitled, 
" An Act [or Ordinance] for the government of the People of South Carolina," and had 
gone on, in the body of the instrument, to declare that the Powers embraced in the Con- 
stitution of the United States should be exercised by the agents therein provided, until 
otherwise ordered, there would have been something left for a repeal to operate upon. 
But nothing like this was done, and everybody knows that such a ratification could not 
have been accepted. 

There are those, as you are well aware, who pretend that the most absolute and un- 
restricted terms of cession, which would carry any otlier subject entirely out of the 
grantor, do not so operate when the subject of the grant is political sovereignty. But a 
political school which maintains that a deed is to be construed in one way when it ])ur- 
ports to convey one description of right, such as political sovereignty, and in another 



44 APPENDIX. 

way when it purports to convey a right of another kind, such as property, would hold a 
very weak brief in any tribunal of jurisprudence, if the question could he brought to 
that arbitrament. The American people have been very much accustomed to treat i)oliti- 
cal grants, made by the sovereign power without reservation, as irrevocable conveyances 
and executed contracts ; and although they hold to the right of revolution, they have not 
yet found out how a deed, absolute on its face, is to be treated in point of law, as a re- 
pealable instrument, because it deals with political rights and duties. If any court in 
South Carolina were now to have the question come before it, whether the laws of the 
United States are still binding upon their citizens, I think they would have to put their 
denial upon the naked doctrine oi revolution ; and that they could not hold that, as mat- 
ter of law and regular political action, their ratification deed of May 23d, 1788, is "re- 
pealed" by their late ordinance. Most truly and respectfully yours, 



Me. Everett. 



Geo. T. Curtis. 



APPENDIX B, p. 22. 

Hon. Eeyerdy JonssoiJ to Mr. Everett. 

Baltimoue, 24th June, ISCl. 

My Dear Mr. Everett. 

I have your note of the 18th, and cheerfully authorize you to use my name, as you 
suggest. 

The letter I read in the speech which I made in Frederick, should be conclusive evi- 
dence that, at its date, Mr. Calhoun denied the right of secession, as a constitutional right, 
either express or implied. 

But, in addition to this, I had frequent opportunities of knowing that this was his 
opinion. It was my good fortune to be a member of the Senate of the United States, 
whilst he was one of its greatest ornaments, for four years, from 1845, until I became a 
member of Gen, Taylor's administration, and during two sessions (I think 1846 and 1847) 
I lived in the same house with him. He did me th Sonor to give me much of his confi- 
dence, and frequently his nullification doctrnie was the subject of conversation. Time 
and time again have I heard him, and with ever increased surprise at his wonderful 
acuteness, defend it on Constitutional grounds, and distinguish it, in that respect, from the 
doctrine of Secession. This last he never, with me, placed on any other ground than 
that of revolution. This, he said, was to destroy the Government ; and no Constitution, 
the work of sane men, ever provided for its own destruction. The other was to preserve 
it, was, practically, but to amend it, and in a constitutional mode. As you know, and he 
was ever told, I never took that view. I coi;ld see no more constitutional warrant for 
this than for the other, which, I repeat, he ever in all our interviews repudiated, as 
wholly indefensible as a constitutional remedy. His mind, with all its wonderful power, 
was so ingenious that it often led him into error, and at times to such an extent as to be 
guilty of the most palpable inconsistencies. His views of the tariff and internal improve- 
ment powers of the Government, are instances. His first opinions upon both Avere 
decided, and almost ultra. His earliest reputation was won as their advocate, and yet 
four years before his death he denounced both, with constant zeal and with rare power, 
and, whilst doing so, boldly asserted his uniform consistency. It is no marvel, therefore, 
with those who have observed his career and studied his character, to hear it stated now 
that he was the advocate of constitutional secession. 

It may be so, and perhaps is so ; but this in no way supports the doctrine, as far as it 
is rested on his autliority. His first views were well considered and formed, without the 
influence of extraneous circumstances, of which he seemed to me to bo often the victim. 



APPENDIX. 45 

Pure in private life and in motives, ever, as I believe and liavc always believed, patriotic, 

he was induced, seemingly without knowing it, in his later life, to surrender to section 

what w^as intended for the -whole, his great powers of analysis and his extraordinary 

talent for public service. If such a heresy, therefore, as constitutional secession could ' 

rest on any individual name, if any mere human autliority could support such an absurd 

and destructive folly, it cannot be said to rest on that of Mr. Calhoun. 

With sincere regard, your friend, 

Eevep.dy Jonxsox. 
Hon. Edwaed Eyeeett, Boston. 



APPENDIX C, p. CI. 

The number of fugitive slaves, from all the States, as I learn from Mr. J. C. G. Ken- 
nedy, the intelligent superintendent of the census bureau, was, in the year 1850, 1,011, 
being about one to every 3,165, the entire number of slaves at that time being 3,200,36-1, 
a ratio of rather more than ^'^ of one per cent. This very small ratio was diminished 
in 1860. By the last census, the whole number of slaves in the United States was 3,949,- 
557, and the number of escaping fugitives was 803, being a trifle over -^^ of one jser cent. 
Of these it is probable that much the greater part escaped to the places of refuge in the 
South, alluded to in the text. At all events, it is well known that escaping slaves, re- 
claimed in the free States, have in almost every instance been restored. 

There is usually some difficulty in reclaiming fugitives of any description, who have 
escaped to another jurisdiction. In most of the cases of fugitives from justice, which 
came under my cognizance as ITnited States Minister in London, every conceivable diffi- 
culty was thrown in my way, and sometimes with success, by the counsel for the parties 
whose extradition was demanded under the "Webster- Ashburton treaty. The French Am- 
bassador told me, that he had made thirteen unsuccessful attempts to procure the surren- 
der of fugitives from justice, under the extradition treaty between the two governments. 
The difficulty generally grew out of the difference of the jurisprudence of the two coun- 
tries, in the definition of crimes, rules of evidence, and mode of procedure. 

The number of blacks living in Upper Canada and assumed to be all from the United 
States, is sometimes stated as high as forty thousand, and is constantly referred to, at the 
South, as showing the great number of fugitives. But it must be remembered that the 
manumissions far exceed in number the escaping fugitives. I learn from Mr. Kennedy 
that while in 1860 the number of fugitives was but 808, that of manumissions was 8,010. 
As the manumitted slaves are compelled to leave the States where they are set free, and 
a small portion only emigrate to Liberia, at least nine-tenths of tliis number arc scattered 
through the northern States and Canada. In the decade from 1850 to 1860, it is estimat- 
ed that 20,000 slaves were manumitted, of whom three-fourths probably joined their 
brethren in Canada. This supply alone, with the natural increase on the old stock and 
the new comers, will account for the entire population of the province. 

A very able and instructive discussion of the statistics of this subject will be found in 
the Boston Courier of the 9th of July. It is there demonstrated that the assertion that 
the Northern States got rid of their slaves by selling them to the South, is utterly un- 
supported by the official returns of the census. 



46 APPENDIX. 



APPENDIX D, p. 37. 

* In his message to the Confederate Congress of the 29th April last, Mr. Jefferson Davis 
presents a most glowing account of the prosperity of the peculiar institution of the South. 
He states, indeed, that it was " imperilled'' by Northern agitation, but he does not affn-m 
(and the contrary, as far as I have observed, is strenuously maintained at the South) that 
its progress has been checked or its stability in the slightest degree shaken. 

I think I have seen statements by Mr. Senator Hunter of Virginia, that the institution 
of slavery has been benefited and its interests promoted, since the systematic agitation 
of the subject began ; but I am unable to lay my hand on the speech, in Avhich, if I recollect 
rightly, this view was taken by the distinguished senator. 

I find the following extracts from the speeches of two distinguished southern senators, 
in "The Union," a spirited paper published at St. Cloud, Minnesota: 

It was often said at the North, and admitted l)y candid statesmen at the South, that anti-slavery 
agitation strengthened rather than weakened slavery. Here are the admissions of Senator Hammond 
on this point, in a speech which he delivered in South Carolina, October 24, 1858 : — 

"And what then (1833) was the state of opinion in the South? "Washington had emancipated 
his slaves. Jefferson had bitterly denounced the system, and had done all that he could to destroy 
it. Our C]a3's, Marshalls, Crawfords, and many other prominent Southern men, led off in the coloni- 
zation scheme. The inevitable effect in the South was that she believed slavery to be an evil — 
weakness — disgraceful — nay, a sin. She shi'uuk from the discussion of it. She cowered under every 
threat. She attempted to apologize, to excuse herself under the plea — which was true — that Eng- 
land had forced it upon her ; and in fear and trembling she awaited a doom that she deemed inevi- 
table. But a few bold spirits took the question up — they compelled the South to investigate it anew 
and thoroughly, and what is the result ? Why, it would be difficult to find now a Southern man who 
feels the system to be the lightest burden on his conscience ; who does not, in fact, regard it as an 
equal advantage to the master and the slave, elevating both, as wealth, strength, and power, and as 
one of the main pillars and controlling influences of modern civilization, and who is not now pre- 
pared to maintain it at every hazard, tiuch have been the happy results of this aholilion discussion. 

" So far our yain has been inuncnse from this contest, savage and malignant as it has been." 

And again he says : — 

" The rock of Gibraltar does not stand so firm on its basis as our slave system. For a quarter 
of a century it has borne the brunt of a hurricane as fierce and pitiless as ever raged. At the North, 
and in Europe, they cried ' havoc,' and let loose upon us all the dogs of war. And how stands it 
HOW ? Why, in this very quarter of a century our slaves have doubled in numbers, and each slave 
has more than doubled in value. The very negro who, as a prime laborer, would have brought $400 
in 1828, would now, with thirty more years upon him, sell for $800." 

Equally strong admissions were made by A. H. Stephens, now Yice-Presidcnt of the " Confed- 
eracy," in that carefully prepared speech v.'hich he delivered in Georgia in July, 1859, on the occasion 
of retiring from pubhc life. He then said : — 

" Nor am I of the number of those who believe that we have sustained any injury by these 
agitations. It is true, wo were not responsible for them. We were not the aggressors. We acted 
on the defensive. We repelled assault, calumny, and aspersion, by argument, by reason, and truth. 
But so far from the institution of African slavery in our section being weakened or rendered less 
secure by the discussion, my deliberate judgment is that it has bee7i greatly strengthened and forti- 
fied — strengthened and fortified not only in the opinions, convictions, and consciences of men, but 
by the action of the Government." 



"E PLURIBUS UNUM." 



Burke remarks that " the march of the human mind is slow " in the discovery 
and application of great political truths. With respect to the all-important rpies- 
tion what is the best form of government, two truths only of the highest order 
have been discovered and applied before the American Revolution. Pope would 
suppress all further search in this direction, by his magnificent epigram : 

For forms of government let fools contest, 
Whate'cr is best administered is best. 

But this doctrine, absurd in itself, settles nothing. Besides placing the govern- 
ment of Turkey and that of England on the same footing, it leaves unanswered the 
only important question, what form of government is most likely to be best ad- 
ministered ? Alexander the First of Russia understood this: when Madame de 
Stael flattered him that his character was the Constitution of his empire, he an- 
swered that if that was the case, their welfore depended on an accident. 

The two -reat truths referred to were, that small states admitted free govern- 
ments, and that large empires required strong ones ; understanding by free govern- 
ments those which proceed directly from the governed, and are directly responsible 
to them • and by strong governments, those which rest only on the acquiescence 
of the people ; which are upheld by military power ; and which admitted no remedy 
for abuses but the moral influence of public opinion and the extreme right of revo- 
lution, rri r f 

The ancient world did not get beyond these two principles, ilie hrst was 
applied for short periods in Greece and Rome ; but all the rest of the world, as 
far as we know from the beginning, and the two states just named, after brief and 
unsuccessful experiments of free institutions, settled down upon the assumption 
that the Nations of the Earth, in the long run, could be ruled by nothing but the 
strong arm of power. It has sometimes seemed that you might say of all Peoples 
what one of the ministers of Louis Philippe said, after his downfall, of his own 
country— that there are two kinds of government which the people of France will 
not submit to, viz. : a Republic and a Monarchy. The dangerous maladies of 

* Respecting » e plukibits unum," Mr Everett ^vrite3 to tho publisher: "It ^vas originally intended as a part 
of my oration r but finding that ^vas running unduly to length, I determined to send it as an art.clo to Mr. Bonner, 
for the New York Ledger. It is hero re-published by tho special permission of Mr. Bonner. 



^g "E PLURIBUS UNUM." 

States sometimes spring not from this or tliat alleged abuse, but from the am- 
bitions, the passions, and the corruptions of the leaders and the led, ^vhlch make 
amj government impossible. 

The two principles to which I have alluded had each its great attending evil, 
that rendered some further progress in the Science of Government necessary for 
the happiness of mankind. The welfare of small states under republican govern- 
ments, wholly administered by the people or very directly responsible to them, is 
apt to be constantly disturbed by gusts of popular passion. For the want of that 
time for reflection— that pause between the different stages of administration, which 
obtains in a system that spreads over a great space and large populations— the 
most momentous measures may be decided by the caprice of a popular assembly 
at a sinale session. All the social institutions and interests tremble for want of 
stability, and property and life become so precarious as to be almost worthless ^ 

Then, if the state is very small, the policy will be small, the standard of politi- 
cal character low, and every thing be planned and executed on a petty municipal 
scale. If a great character. Heaven inspired, springs up, his first impulse will 
necessarily be to stretch beyond the limits of the tribe, and by peaceful alliance or 
the conquering sword, possess himself of a broader and a nobler field of action. 
Moses leads forth his brethren from an Egyptian province to the conquest of 
Canaan. Pericles, from the citadel of Athens, struggles for the sovereignty of 
Greece. The chiefs of Eepublican Rome grasp at the dominion first of the sur- 
rounding states of Italy, and then of the world. 

Finally, if a small state stands alone in the vicinity of a powerful neighbor, it 
holds its existence on sufierance. If a group of small independent states are placed 
Bide by side in the same region, they are doomed to eternal wars with each other, 
and fall at last the victims one by one to the intrigues or arms of the nearest ag- 
<Tressive Power. There were more than a hundred Hanse towns in the middle 
ages, each an independent little republic; Bremen, Hamburg, and Liibeck alone 

are left. , . . , ^ , 

In this way the first form of government cither sinks by its mnercnt weakness, 
and becomes a prey to its powerful neighbor, or grows up itself into an aggressive 
and conquering state, ruled of necessity by a strong hand. 

The besetting evil of strong governments ruling over great empires is the neces- 
sarily uncompromising nature of Power. The rights and interests of individuals 
are crushed by the inflexible rule. Power is a divine force, but on earth it has got 
to be wielded by fidlible, often by wicked men. The power which decides the 
fates of millions by a rescript, has no time to study individual cases and examine 
particular localities. During the visit of the Emperor Nicholas to London m 1844, 
I was informed by a person in near attendance upon him, that more than nme hun- 
dred letters came to his address from Russia, in the three or four days of his visit. 
At home the daily number must be greater. How is it possible that one mind, 
with whatever subdivision of labor, can give heed to such a vast number ot daily 
applications ? The memoirs of Baron ^lenncval, the private secretary of Napoleon 
I., throw much light on this point; especially when we consider, that in addition 
to the personal appeals made to himself, the great mass of the business ot his em- 
pire must, of course, have been transacted with the civil and military chiets and 
departments of all ranks and names. 



BY EDWARD EVERETT. 49 

However wisely or kindly such a government is administered, it is impossible 
that there should not be wholesale abuse, oppression, and corruption, especially in 
the remote dependencies and subject provinces, given up to subordinate tyrants of 
every name — Satraps, Viceroys, Proconsuls, and military governors. 

To escape the evils incident to the two kinds of government, political wisdom 
has been tasked to unite in some modified form the chai'acteristic advantages of 
each, combining the power and stability of large empires with the benefits of re- 
sponsible local administration peculiar to small free states. Various devices have 
been resorted to, in order to effect this object ; municipal and national charters ; 
councils of state, and especially parliaments and courts of justice ; all intended in 
their appropriate ways to relieve the austerity of despotic power, to protect indi- 
vidual right, and reflect popular feeling and opinion. The governments of the lead- 
ing Powers of Europe are specimens of the difTerent ways in Avhich this all-impor- 
tant problem has been solved. The great success which has attended the attempt 
made in England to combine a strong central hereditary power, with a privileged 
class in one branch of the legislature, and a representative body directly respon- 
sible to the people in the other, has given a prestige to parliamentary government 
in the other European States ; — but it has almost wholly failed in most of the 
monarchies where it has been tried, and has not fully succeeded in any of them. 
But the march of the mind is slow ; — important changes in government have 
seldom succeeded in the world, except when they have grown up from an historical 
germ. 

There was, therefore, manifestly room for a further improvement, some new 
mode of combining the benefits of freedom and power, the characteristic advantages 
of large and small states, the local administration of local interests with the strength 
and stability of imperial sway. The march of the human mind is slow, but it had 
reached a point where the want of such an improvement was urgently felt ; where 
a noble stage for the experiment was provided ; and auspicious circumstances con- 
curred for its success. 

A family of provincial settlements, within a little more than two centuries and 
a half, Avas established upon the Eastern shores of this Continent, under the aus- 
pices of the great powers of Europe, principally England. Mainly neglected by 
the parent States, they were trained in the discipline of local government, to a con- 
siderable degree responsible to the people. They opened no very tempting field 
to proconsular ambition, and offered no rich bribes to proconsular greed. Nearly 
homogeneous in origin, language, and the other great traits of Nationality ; con- 
nected with each other as provinces subject to the same crown ; driven by the 
exigencies of border war to act together for the common safety and defence ; 
separated by the Atlantic and the wilderness from the rest of the world, they grew 
up as one People ; ripe, when the accepted time should arrive, to be constituted 
under one government. As separate Colonies they became familiar with all the 
resorts and appliances of an independent political organization, modelled mainly 
after the pattern of the parent country ; while common interests and wants bound 
them together in kindly interdependence. 

Thus the most hopeful preparation was made for the discovery of a new polit- 
ical Truth ; — the establishment of a form of government, not new in its elements, 
but new in their adjustment and combination. If it succeeds, the great defect in 



50 "E PLURIBUS UNUM." 

all pre-existing governments is remedied, and the glowing visions of sages and 
patriots are fulfdled. A very remarkable passage from Montesquieu, quoted in 
the ninth number of the Federalist, pointed directly to the establishment of a form 
of government of which all the materials, unknown to that celebrated writer, were 
existing on this continent when the American Revolution broke out. In 1748, 
while half of North America was subject to France, and the other half to England, 
and the rise of a great new power in this quarter of the world was as little dreamed 
of as the emei'gence of a new continent from the depths of the ocean, the great 
French philosopher-statesman observed, that — " It is very probable that mankind 
would have been obliged at length to live constantly under the government of a 
single person, had they not contrived a kind of constitution, that has all the in- 
ternal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchical 
government ; I mean a confederate republic. 

*•' This form of government is a convention, by which several smaller states agree 
to become members of a larger one, which they intend to form. It is a kind of 
assemblage of societies that constitutes a new one, capable of increasing by means 
of new associations, till they arrive at such a degree of power as to be able to 
provide for the security of the united body." 

Montesquieu was closely studied by the statesmen of the revolution, and it is 
somev/hat amusing to witness the adroitness with which, in the address of the Con- 
tinental Congress to the people of Quebec in 1774, he is quoted as " your country- 
man, the immortal Montesquieu." But Montesquieu had no better examples of 
modern confederacies than those of the Netherlands and Switzerland, and it is not 
wonderful that he did not more distinctly announce the conditions which were essen- 
tial to the solution of the great problem. 

It would be but an abridgment of the History of the Revolution to rehearse 
the successive steps by which the great consummation was effected. They can be 
but briefly hinted at. First, a spontaneous uprising and self-assertion of the citi- 
zens of the colonies as one People, involved in a common peril, engaged in a com- 
mon cause, and represented by delegates in a congress, which, without a constitution, 
written or unwritten, acts as a supreme government, and nominally with undisputed 
authority for peace and for war. Second, an organization of the local governments 
made on the advice of the Continental Congress, given at the request of the late 
colonies, and brought about as nearly as possible by such changes in the provincial 
institutions as fitted them to meet the new state of affairs. Such was the first 
simple machinery of the new order of things ; Congress without any express dele- 
gation of power acting for the whole ; the State Governments newly constituted, 
administering the local interests, and forming a medium of communication between 
the people and the Central Power. 

An intermediary year of transition passes ; the movement sloAvly takes the 
form of revolution ; petitions for redress are laid without success at the foot of the 
throne ; the blood of Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker Hill is shed, and at 
length the Independence of the United States is declared. It is declared because 
when " it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the political bands which 
have connected them with another, * * a decent respect for the opinions of man- 
kind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to the sepa- 
ration," 



BY EDWARD EVERETT. 51 

Thus the independence of the United States is declared, but no act of union 
exists, and the thoughts of the Fathers are immediately turned to its formation. 
In a solemn address to the people in the summer of 1775, assigning the causes of 
their resort to arms, the Congress asserts that " our Union is perfect ; " but it was 
so in spirit, and by the irresistible force of circumstances, and not in virtue of any 
constitutional organization. This was delayed till the contest was nearly over. 
It is a popular error that the Articles of Confederation carried the country through 
the war. Those Articles were not finally adopted by all the Colonies till the 
Spring of 1781, a few months before the war was virtually brought to a close by 
the surrender at Yorktown. 

This was the next distinct step toward tlic accomplishment of the great ulterior 
object, but not wisely nor successfully taken. The ages that had gone before them 
furnished no practical guide ; the sagacity of the theorist was at fault. The framers 
of the Confederation were misled by that respectable name, beyond which political 
philosophy had not travelled, and they forgot that a federal compact was not a 
united government. They accordingly made no provision for the action of the 
Central power on the individual citizen; and this defect was flital. The powers 
nominally granted to Congress were adequate, but there was no executive to ad- 
minister them, and no means of enforcing the obedience of the people. Accord- 
ingly, when the perils of war ceased to furnish a bond of Union, the Articles of 
Confederation failed entirely to accomplish that end. They had not carried the 
country through the war ; nor could they carry it through the peace that followed. 
One more effort, or rather a scries of conspiring efforts, on the part of Congress, 
the States, and the People, and the great work is accomplished. The Federal Con- 
stitution is framed ; and while the separate State Governments remain unimpaired, 
for all the purposes of purely local administration, the people embodied in the 
States are moulded into the people of the Union. Without ceasing to be a citizen 
of the individual State, every individual became a citizen of the United States. 
The new Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof, are declared to be 
the Supreme law of the land, any thing in the Constitution and laws of the separate 
States to the contrary notwithstanding. 

By this simple device, the great improvement in the science and practice of 
civil polity is effected. We have now a complex system of local and general govern- 
ment ; providing for all the ends and exigencies of administration at home, and at 
the same time creating an efficient central power. I call the device simple, but 
description can hardly do justice to the combination of circumstances necessary to 
its origin, its successful application, and its convenient expansion with the lapse of 
time. The colonial training ; the revolutionary struggle ; the protecting ocean in 
front ; the broad, unoccupied continent in the rear ; the convulsions of Europe ; 
the successive acquisition of vast territories, aflbrding space for the rapid multipli- 
cation of States, and thus calling into action the utmost vigor of the principle 
vaguely pointed out by Montesquieu, of" increasing by means of new associations." 
Who could have predicted, that in little more than a century from the time when 
those words were uttered, the Anglo-American colonies, then less known to INIon- 
tesquieu than the Iroquois and Tlurons on their borders, would have constituted a 
United People, consisting of thirteen States, to which twenty-one new " associates " 



"E PLURIBUS UNUM." 

52 

should b^addoa. joining the great .orU-ocoa„s. and stretching over t,>e eontinen. 

'""js*:"^i. "one fc^ed &""-->': rtt—firi:!;; 

„hieh United America ha. added to P»';'-^^X ^f a t-U fa'te, and thus forn,: 
..eeoneiling the strength of a great wth *o J ^^n of a sm ^^^^^ ^ 

i„g a decentralized repuhhcan empir^ J-^^^ «° ^^ ^„^ „f „,„.s hands, 

have shown the ''''8''"'^ """"j^^'S'^'^J^t^ nether ancient nor modern times 
it exhibits the imperfections of lunnamt, ''»' "" '" " ,^^^„^ ,,^,,„ „isis, 

coming time ! 



i60 



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